Washington Irving
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Title: Washington Irving
Author: Charles Dudley Warner
Release date: October 10, 2004 [eBook #3101]
Most recently updated: January 8, 2021
Language: English
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WASHINGTON IRVING
By Charles Dudley Warner
1891
EDITOR'S NOTE
WASHINGTON IRVING, the first biography published in the American Men
of Letters Series, came out in December, 1881. It was an expansion of a
biographical and critical sketch prefixed to the first volume of a new
edition of Irving's works which began to appear in 1880. It was entitled
the Geoffrey Crayon edition, and was in twenty-seven volumes, which
were brought out, in most cases, in successive months. The first volume
appeared in April. The essay was subsequently published during the same
year in a volume entitled “Studies of Irving,” which contained also
Bryant's oration and George P. Putnam's personal reminiscences.
“The Work of Washington Irving” was published early in August, 1893.
Originally it was delivered as a lecture to the Brooklyn Institute
of Arts and Sciences on April 3, 1893, the one hundred and tenth
anniversary of Irving's birth.
T. R. L.
WASHINGTON IRVING
I. PRELIMINARY
It is over twenty years since the death of Washington Irving removed
that personal presence which is always a powerful, and sometimes the
sole, stimulus to the sale of an author's books, and which strongly
affects the contemporary judgment of their merits. It is nearly a
century since his birth, which was almost coeval with that of the
Republic, for it took place the year the British troops evacuated
the city of New York, and only a few months before General Washington
marched in at the head of the Continental army and took possession
of the metropolis. For fifty years Irving charmed and instructed the
American people, and was the author who held, on the whole, the
first place in their affections. As he was the first to lift American
literature into the popular respect of Europe, so for a long time he was
the chief representative of the American name in the world of letters.
During this period probably no citizen of the Republic, except the
Father of his Country, had so wide a reputation as his namesake,
Washington Irving.
It is time to inquire what basis this great reputation had in
enduring qualities, what portion of it was due to local and favoring
circumstances, and to make an impartial study of the author's literary
rank and achievement.
The tenure of a literary reputation is the most uncertain and
fluctuating of all. The popularity of an author seems to depend quite as
much upon fashion or whim as upon a change in taste or in literary
form. Not only is contemporary judgment often at fault, but posterity
is perpetually revising its opinion. We are accustomed to say that the
final rank of an author is settled by the slow consensus of mankind in
disregard of the critics; but the rank is after all determined by the
few best minds of any given age, and the popular judgment has very
little to do with it. Immediate popularity, or currency, is a nearly
valueless criterion of merit. The settling of high rank even in the
popular mind does not necessarily give currency; the so-called best
authors are not those most widely read at any given time. Some who
attain the position of classics are subject to variations in popular
and even in scholarly favor or neglect. It happens to the princes of
literature to encounter periods of varying duration when their names
are revered and their books are not read. The growth, not to say the
fluctuation, of Shakespeare's popularity is one of the curiosities of
literary history. Worshiped by his contemporaries, apostrophized by
Milton only fourteen pears after his death as the “dear son of memory,
great heir to fame”,
“So sepulchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings, for such a tomb, would wish to die,”
he was neglected by the succeeding age, the subject of violent extremes
of opinion in the eighteenth century, and so lightly esteemed by some
that Hume could doubt if he were a poet “capable of furnishing a proper
entertainment to a refined and intelligent audience,” and attribute to
the rudeness of his “disproportioned and misshapen” genius the “reproach
of barbarism” which the English nation had suffered from all its
neighbors. Only recently has the study of him by English scholars--I do
not refer to the verbal squabbles over the text--been proportioned to
his preeminence, and his fame is still slowly asserting itself among
foreign peoples.
There are already signs that we are not to accept as the final judgment
upon the English contemporaries of Irving the currency their writings
have now. In the case of Walter Scott, although there is already visible
a reaction against a reaction, he is not, at least in America, read by
this generation as he was by the last. This faint reaction is no doubt
a sign of a deeper change impending in philosophic and metaphysical
speculation. An age is apt to take a lurch in a body one way or another,
and those most active in it do not always perceive how largely its
direction is determined by what are called mere systems of philosophy.
The novelist may not know whether he is steered by Kant, or Hegel,
or Schopenhauer. The humanitarian novel, the fictions of passion, of
realism, of doubt, the poetry and the essays addressed to the mood of
unrest, of questioning, to the scientific spirit and to the shifting
attitudes of social change and reform, claim the attention of an age
that is completely adrift in regard to the relations of the supernatural
and the material, the ideal and the real. It would be natural if in such
a time of confusion the calm tones of unexaggerated literary art should
be not so much heeded as the more strident voices. Yet when the passing
fashion of this day is succeeded by the fashion of another, that which
is most acceptable to the thought and feeling of the present may be
without an audience; and it may happen that few recent authors will be
read as Scott and the writers of the early part of this century will be
read. It may, however, be safely predicted that those writers of fiction
worthy to be called literary artists will best retain their hold who
have faithfully painted the manners of their own time.
Irving has shared the neglect of the writers of his generation. It would
be strange, even in America, if this were not so. The development of
American literature (using the term in its broadest sense) in the past
forty years is greater than could have been expected in a nation which
had its ground to clear, its wealth to win, and its new governmental
experiment to adjust; if we confine our view to the last twenty years,
the national production is vast in amount and encouraging in quality.
It suffices to say of it here, in a general way, that the most vigorous
activity has been in the departments of history, of applied science, and
the discussion of social and economic problems. Although pure literature
has made considerable gains, the main achievement has been in other
directions. The audience of the literary artist has been less than
that of the reporter of affairs and discoveries and the special
correspondent. The age is too busy, too harassed, to have time for
literature; and enjoyment of writings like those of Irving depends upon
leisure of mind. The mass of readers have cared less for form than for
novelty and news and the satisfying of a recently awakened curiosity.
This was inevitable in an era of journalism, one marked by the marvelous
results attained in the fields of religion, science, and art, by
the adoption of the comparative method. Perhaps there is no better
illustration of the vigor and intellectual activity of the age than a
living English writer, who has traversed and illuminated almost every
province of modern thought, controversy, and scholarship; but who
supposes that Mr. Gladstone has added anything to permanent literature?
He has been an immense force in his own time, and his influence the
next generation will still feel and acknowledge, while it reads, not
the writings of Mr. Gladstone, but, maybe, those of the author of “Henry
Esmond” and the biographer of “Rab and His Friends.” De Quincey divides
literature into two sorts, the literature of power and the literature
of knowledge. The latter is of necessity for to-day only, and must be
revised to-morrow. The definition has scarcely De Quincey's usual verbal
felicity, but we can apprehend the distinction he intended to make.
It is to be noted also, and not with regard to Irving only, that the
attention of young and old readers has been so occupied and distracted
by the flood of new books, written with the single purpose of satisfying
the wants of the day, produced and distributed with marvelous cheapness
and facility, that the standard works of approved literature remain for
the most part unread upon the shelves. Thirty years ago Irving was much
read in America by young people, and his clear style helped to form
a good taste and correct literary habits. It is not so now. The
manufacturers of books, periodicals, and newspapers for the young keep
the rising generation fully occupied, with a result to its taste and
mental fiber which, to say the least of it, must be regarded with some
apprehension. The “plant,” in the way of money and writing industry
invested in the production of juvenile literature, is so large and is
so permanent an interest, that it requires more discriminating
consideration than can be given to it in a passing paragraph.
Besides this, and with respect to Irving in particular, there has been
in America a criticism--sometimes called the destructive, sometimes the
Donnybrook Fair--that found “earnestness” the only amusing thing in the
world, that brought to literary art the test of utility, and disparaged
what is called the “Knickerbocker School” (assuming Irving to be the
head of it) as wanting in purpose and virility, a merely romantic
development of the post-Revolutionary period. And it has been to some
extent the fashion to damn with faint admiration the pioneer if not the
creator of American literature as the “genial” Irving.
Before I pass to an outline of the career of this representative
American author, it is necessary to refer for a moment to certain
periods, more or less marked, in our literature. I do not include in
it the works of writers either born in England or completely English in
training, method, and tradition, showing nothing distinctively American
in their writings except the incidental subject. The first authors whom
we may regard as characteristic of the new country--leaving out the
productions of speculative theology--devoted their genius to politics.
It is in the political writings immediately preceding and following the
Revolution--such as those of Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Franklin, Jefferson
that the new birth of a nation of original force and ideas is declared.
It has been said, and I think the statement can be maintained, that for
any parallel to those treatises on the nature of government, in
respect to originality and vigor, we must go back to classic times.
But literature, that is, literature which is an end in itself and not
a means to something else, did not exist in America before Irving.
Some foreshadowings (the autobiographical fragment of Franklin was not
published till 1817) of its coming may be traced, but there can be
no question that his writings were the first that bore the national
literary stamp, that he first made the nation conscious of its gift and
opportunity, and that he first announced to trans-Atlantic readers the
entrance of America upon the literary field. For some time he was our
only man of letters who had a reputation beyond seas.
Irving was not, however, the first American who made literature a
profession and attempted to live on its fruits. This distinction belongs
to Charles Brockden Brown, who was born in Philadelphia, January 27,
1771, and, before the appearance in a newspaper of Irving's juvenile
essays in 1802, had published several romances, which were hailed
as original and striking productions by his contemporaries, and even
attracted attention in England. As late as 1820 a prominent British
review gives Mr. Brown the first rank in our literature as an original
writer and characteristically American. The reader of to-day who has the
curiosity to inquire into the correctness of this opinion will, if he
is familiar with the romances of the eighteenth century, find little
originality in Brown's stories, and nothing distinctively American. The
figures who are moved in them seem to be transported from the pages of
foreign fiction to the New World, not as it was, but as it existed in
the minds of European sentimentalists.
Mr. Brown received a fair education in a classical school in his native
city, and studied law, which he abandoned on the threshold of practice,
as Irving did, and for the same reason. He had the genuine literary
impulse, which he obeyed against all the arguments and entreaties of his
friends. Unfortunately, with a delicate physical constitution he had a
mind of romantic sensibility, and in the comparative inaction imposed by
his frail health he indulged in visionary speculation, and in solitary
wanderings which developed the habit of sentimental musing. It was
natural that such reveries should produce morbid romances. The tone
of them is that of the unwholesome fiction of his time, in which the
“seducer” is a prominent and recognized character in social life, and
female virtue is the frail sport of opportunity. Brown's own life was
fastidiously correct, but it is a curious commentary upon his estimate
of the natural power of resistance to vice in his time, that he regarded
his feeble health as good fortune, since it protected him from the
temptations of youth and virility.
While he was reading law he constantly exercised his pen in the
composition of essays, some of which were published under the title of
the “Rhapsodist;” but it was not until 1797 that his career as an
author began, by the publication of “Alcuin: a Dialogue on the Rights
of Women.” This and the romances which followed it show the powerful
influence upon him of the school of fiction of William Godwin, and the
movement of emancipation of which Mary Wollstonecraft was the leader.
The period of social and political ferment during which “Alcuin” was put
forth was not unlike that which may be said to have reached its height
in extravagance and millennial expectation in 1847-48. In “Alcuin” are
anticipated most of the subsequent discussions on the right of women
to property and to self-control, and the desirability of revising the
marriage relation. The injustice of any more enduring union than that
founded upon the inclination of the hour is as ingeniously urged in
“Alcuin” as it has been in our own day.
Mr. Brown's reputation rests upon six romances: “Wieland,” “Ormond,”
“Arthur Mervyn,” “Edgar Huntly,” “Clara Howard,” and “Jane Talbot.” The
first five were published in the interval between the spring of 1798
and the summer of 1801, in which he completed his thirtieth year.
“Jane Talbot” appeared somewhat later. In scenery and character,
these romances are entirely unreal. There is in them an affectation of
psychological purpose which is not very well sustained, and a somewhat
clumsy introduction of supernatural machinery. Yet they have a power of
engaging the attention in the rapid succession of startling and
uncanny incidents and in adventures in which the horrible is sometimes
dangerously near the ludicrous. Brown had not a particle of humor. Of
literary art there is little, of invention considerable; and while the
style is to a certain extent unformed and immature, it is neither feeble
nor obscure, and admirably serves the author's purpose of creating what
the children call a “crawly” impression. There is undeniable power in
many of his scenes, notably in the descriptions of the yellow fever
in Philadelphia, found in the romance of “Arthur Mervyn.” There is,
however, over all of them a false and pallid light; his characters are
seen in a spectral atmosphere. If a romance is to be judged, not by
literary rules, but by its power of making an impression upon the mind,
such power as a ghastly story has, told by the chimney-corner on a
tempestuous night, then Mr. Brown's romances cannot be dismissed without
a certain recognition. But they never represented anything distinctively
American, and their influence upon American literature is scarcely
discernible.
Subsequently Mr. Brown became interested in political subjects, and
wrote upon them with vigor and sagacity. He was the editor of two
short-lived literary periodicals which were nevertheless useful in their
day: “The Monthly Magazine and American Review,” begun in New York in
the spring of 1798, and ending in the autumn of 1800; and “The Literary
Magazine and American Register,” which was established in Philadelphia
in 1803--It was for this periodical that Mr. Brown, who visited Irving
in that year, sought in vain to enlist the service of the latter, who,
then a youth of nineteen, had a little reputation as the author of some
humorous essays in the “Morning Chronicle” newspaper.
Charles Brockden Brown died, the victim of a lingering consumption,
in 1810, at the age of thirty-nine. In pausing for a moment upon his
incomplete and promising career, we should not forget to recall the
strong impression he made upon his contemporaries as a man of genius,
the testimony to the charm of his conversation and the goodness of
his heart, nor the pioneer service he rendered to letters before the
provincial fetters were at all loosened.
The advent of Cooper, Bryant, and Halleck was some twenty years after
the recognition of Irving; but thereafter the stars thicken in our
literary sky, and when in 1832 Irving returned from his long sojourn in
Europe, he found an immense advance in fiction, poetry, and historical
composition. American literature was not only born,--it was able to go
alone. We are not likely to overestimate the stimulus to this movement
given by Irving's example, and by his success abroad. His leadership
is recognized in the respectful attitude towards him of all his
contemporaries in America. And the cordiality with which he gave help
whenever it was asked, and his eagerness to acknowledge merit in others,
secured him the affection of all the literary class, which is popularly
supposed to have a rare appreciation of the defects of fellow craftsmen.
The period from 1830 to 1860 was that of our greatest purely literary
achievement, and, indeed, most of the greater names of to-day were
familiar before 1850. Conspicuous exceptions are Motley and Parkman and
a few belles-lettres writers, whose novels and stories mark a distinct
literary transition since the War of the Rebellion. In the period from
1845 to 1860, there was a singular development of sentimentalism; it had
been, growing before, it did not altogether disappear at the time
named, and it was so conspicuous that this may properly be called the
sentimental era in our literature. The causes of it, and its relation to
our changing national character, are worthy the study of the historian.
In politics, the discussion of constitutional questions, of tariffs and
finance, had given way to moral agitations. Every political movement was
determined by its relation to slavery. Eccentricities of all sorts were
developed. It was the era of “transcendentalism” in New England, of
“come-outers” there and elsewhere, of communistic experiments, of reform
notions about marriage, about woman's dress, about diet; through the
open door of abolitionism women appeared upon its platform, demanding
a various emancipation; the agitation for total abstinence from
intoxicating drinks got under full headway, urged on moral rather than
on the statistical and scientific grounds of to-day; reformed drunkards
went about from town to town depicting to applauding audiences the
horrors of delirium tremens,--one of these peripatetics led about with
him a goat, perhaps as a scapegoat and sin-offering; tobacco was as
odious as rum; and I remember that George Thompson, the eloquent apostle
of emancipation, during his tour in this country, when on one occasion
he was the cynosure of a protracted anti-slavery meeting at Peterboro,
the home of Gerrit Smith, deeply offended some of his co-workers, and
lost the admiration of many of his admirers, the maiden devotees of
green tea, by his use of snuff. To “lift up the voice” and wear long
hair were signs of devotion to a purpose.
In that seething time, the lighter literature took a sentimental tone,
and either spread itself in manufactured fine writing, or lapsed into a
reminiscent and melting mood. In a pretty affectation, we were asked to
meditate upon the old garret, the deserted hearth, the old letters, the
old well-sweep, the dead baby, the little shoes; we were put into a mood
in which we were defenseless against the lukewarm flood of the Tupperean
Philosophy. Even the newspapers caught the bathetic tone. Every “local”
editor breathed his woe over the incidents of the police court, the
falling leaf, the tragedies of the boardinghouse, in the most lachrymose
periods he could command, and let us never lack fine writing, whatever
might be the dearth of news. I need not say how suddenly and completely
this affectation was laughed out of sight by the coming of the
“humorous” writer, whose existence is justified by the excellent service
he performed in clearing the tearful atmosphere. His keen and mocking
method, which is quite distinct from the humor of Goldsmith and Irving,
and differs, in degree at least, from the comic-almanac exaggeration and
coarseness which preceded it, puts its foot on every bud of sentiment,
holds few things sacred, and refuses to regard anything in life
seriously. But it has no mercy for any sham.
I refer to this sentimental era--remembering that its literary
manifestation was only a surface disease, and recognizing fully
the value of the great moral movement in purifying the national
life--because many regard its literary weakness as a legitimate
outgrowth of the Knickerbocker School, and hold Irving in a manner
responsible for it. But I find nothing in the manly sentiment and true
tenderness of Irving to warrant the sentimental gush of his followers,
who missed his corrective humor as completely as they failed to
catch his literary art. Whatever note of localism there was in the
Knickerbocker School, however dilettante and unfruitful it was, it was
not the legitimate heir of the broad and eclectic genius of Irving. The
nature of that genius we shall see in his life.
II. BOYHOOD
Washington Irving was born in the city of New York, April 3, 1783. He
was the eighth son of William and Sarah Irving, and the youngest of
eleven children, three of whom died in infancy. His parents, though of
good origin, began life in humble circumstances. His father was born
on the island of Shapinska. His family, one of the most respectable in
Scotland, traced its descent from William De Irwyn, the secretary and
armorbearer of Robert Bruce; but at the time of the birth of William
Irving its fortunes had gradually decayed, and the lad sought his
livelihood, according to the habit of the adventurous Orkney Islanders,
on the sea.
It was during the French War, and while he was serving as a petty
officer in an armed packet plying between Falmouth and New York, that he
met Sarah Sanders, a beautiful girl, the only daughter of John and
Anna Sanders, who had the distinction of being the granddaughter of an
English curate. The youthful pair were married in 1761, and two years
after embarked for New York, where they landed July 18, 1763. Upon
settling in New York William Irving quit the sea and took to trade,
in which he was successful until his business was broken up by the
Revolutionary War. In this contest he was a stanch Whig, and suffered
for his opinions at the hands of the British occupants of the city, and
both he and his wife did much to alleviate the misery of the American
prisoners. In this charitable ministry his wife, who possessed a rarely
generous and sympathetic nature, was especially zealous, supplying the
prisoners with food from her own table, visiting those who were ill, and
furnishing them with clothing and other necessaries.
Washington was born in a house on William Street, about half-way between
Fulton and John; the following year the family moved across the way
into one of the quaint structures of the time, its gable end with attic
window towards the street; the fashion of which, and very likely the
bricks, came from Holland. In this homestead the lad grew up, and it was
not pulled down till 1849, ten years before his death. The patriot army
occupied the city. “Washington's work is ended,” said the mother, “and
the child shall be named after him.” When the first President was again
in New York, the first seat of the new government, a Scotch maid-servant
of the family, catching the popular enthusiasm, one day followed the
hero into a shop and presented the lad to him. “Please, your honor,”
said Lizzie, all aglow, “here's a bairn was named after you.” And the
grave Virginian placed his hand on the boy's head and gave him his
blessing. The touch could not have been more efficacious, though it
might have lingered longer, if he had known he was propitiating his
future biographer.
New York at the time of our author's birth was a rural city of about
twenty-three thousand inhabitants, clustered about the Battery. It did
not extend northward to the site of the present City Hall Park; and
beyond, then and for several years afterwards, were only country
residences, orchards, and corn-fields. The city was half burned down
during the war, and had emerged from it in a dilapidated condition.
There was still a marked separation between the Dutch and the English
residents, though the Irvings seem to have been on terms of intimacy
with the best of both nationalities. The habits of living were
primitive; the manners were agreeably free; conviviality at the table
was the fashion, and strong expletives had not gone out of use in
conversation. Society was the reverse of intellectual: the aristocracy
were the merchants and traders; what literary culture found expression
was formed on English models, dignified and plentifully garnished
with Latin and Greek allusions; the commercial spirit ruled, and the
relaxations and amusements partook of its hurry and excitement. In their
gay, hospitable, and mercurial character, the inhabitants were true
progenitors of the present metropolis. A newspaper had been established
in 1732, and a theater had existed since 1750. Although the town had a
rural aspect, with its quaint dormer-window houses, its straggling lanes
and roads, and the water-pumps in the middle of the streets, it had the
aspirations of a city, and already much of the metropolitan air.
These were the surroundings in which the boy's literary talent was to
develop. His father was a deacon in the Presbyterian church, a sedate,
God-fearing man, with the strict severity of the Scotch Covenanter,
serious in his intercourse with his family, without sympathy in the
amusements of his children; he was not without tenderness in his nature,
but the exhibition of it was repressed on principle,--a man of high
character and probity, greatly esteemed by his associates. He endeavored
to bring up his children in sound religious principles, and to leave no
room in their lives for triviality. One of the two weekly half-holidays
was required for the catechism, and the only relaxation from the three
church services on Sunday was the reading of “Pilgrim's Progress.” This
cold and severe discipline at home would have been intolerable but for
the more lovingly demonstrative and impulsive character of the mother,
whose gentle nature and fine intellect won the tender veneration of
her children. Of the father they stood in awe; his conscientious piety
failed to waken any religious sensibility in them, and they revolted
from a teaching which seemed to regard everything that was pleasant
as wicked. The mother, brought up an Episcopalian, conformed to the
religious forms and worship of her husband, but she was never in
sympathy with his rigid views. The children were repelled from the creed
of their father, and subsequently all of them except one became attached
to the Episcopal Church. Washington, in order to make sure of his
escape, and feel safe while he was still constrained to attend his
father's church, went stealthily to Trinity Church at an early age,
and received the rite of confirmation. The boy was full of vivacity,
drollery, and innocent mischief. His sportiveness and disinclination to
religious seriousness gave his mother some anxiety, and she would
look at him, says his biographer, with a half-mournful admiration, and
exclaim, “O Washington! if you were only good!” He had a love of
music, which became later in life a passion, and great fondness for the
theater. The stolen delight of the theater he first tasted in company
with a boy who was somewhat his senior, but destined to be his literary
comrade,--James K. Paulding, whose sister was the wife of Irving's
brother William. Whenever he could afford this indulgence, he stole
away early to the theater in John Street, remained until it was time to
return to the family prayers at nine, after which he would retire to
his room, slip through his window and down the roof to a back alley, and
return to enjoy the after-piece.
Young Irving's school education was desultory, pursued under several
more or less incompetent masters, and was over at the age of sixteen.
The teaching does not seem to have had much discipline or solidity;
he studied Latin a few months, but made no other incursion into the
classics. The handsome, tender-hearted, truthful, susceptible boy was no
doubt a dawdler in routine studies, but he assimilated what suited him.
He found his food in such pieces of English literature as were floating
about, in “Robinson Crusoe” and “Sindbad;” at ten he was inspired by
a translation of “Orlando Furioso;” he devoured books of voyages and
travel; he could turn a neat verse, and his scribbling propensities were
exercised in the composition of childish plays. The fact seems to be
that the boy was a dreamer and saunterer; he himself says that he
used to wander about the pier heads in fine weather, watch the ships
departing on long voyages, and dream of going to the ends of the earth.
His brothers Peter and John had been sent to Columbia College, and it is
probable that Washington would have had the same advantage if he had
not shown a disinclination to methodical study. At the age of sixteen he
entered a law office, but he was a heedless student, and never acquired
either a taste for the profession or much knowledge of law. While he sat
in the law office, he read literature, and made considerable progress
in his self-culture; but he liked rambling and society quite as well
as books. In 1798 we find him passing a summer holiday in Westchester
County, and exploring with his gun the Sleepy Hollow region which he
was afterwards to make an enchanted realm; and in 1800 he made his
first voyage up the Hudson, the beauties of which he was the first
to celebrate, on a visit to a married sister who lived in the Mohawk
Valley. In 1802 he became a law clerk in the office of Josiah Ogden
Hoffman, and began that enduring intimacy with the refined and charming
Hoffman family which was so deeply to influence all his life. His health
had always been delicate, and his friends were now alarmed by symptoms
of pulmonary weakness. This physical disability no doubt had much to do
with his disinclination to severe study. For the next two or three years
much time was consumed in excursions up the Hudson and the Mohawk,
and in adventurous journeys as far as the wilds of Ogdensburg and to
Montreal, to the great improvement of his physical condition, and in
the enjoyment of the gay society of Albany, Schenectady, Ballston, and
Saratoga Springs. These explorations and visits gave him material for
future use, and exercised his pen in agreeable correspondence; but his
tendency at this time, and for several years afterwards, was to the idle
life of a man of society. Whether the literary impulse which was born
in him would have ever insisted upon any but an occasional and fitful
expression, except for the necessities of his subsequent condition, is
doubtful.
Irving's first literary publication was a series of letters, signed
Jonathan Oldstyle, contributed in 1802 to the “Morning Chronicle,” a
newspaper then recently established by his brother Peter. The attention
that these audacious satires of the theater, the actors, and their
audience attracted is evidence of the literary poverty of the period.
The letters are open imitations of the “Spectator” and the “Tatler,”
and, although sharp upon local follies, are of no consequence at present
except as foreshadowing the sensibility and quiet humor of the future
author, and his chivalrous devotion to woman. What is worthy of note
is that a boy of nineteen should turn aside from his caustic satire
to protest against the cruel and unmanly habit of jesting at ancient
maidens. It was enough for him that they are women, and possess the
strongest claim upon our admiration, tenderness, and protection.
III. MANHOOD--FIRST VISIT TO EUROPE
Irving's health, always delicate, continued so much impaired when he
came of age, in 1804., that his brothers determined to send him to
Europe. On the 19th of May he took passage for Bordeaux in a sailing
vessel, which reached the mouth of the Garonne on the 25th of June. His
consumptive appearance when he went on board caused the captain to say
to himself, “There's a chap who will go overboard before we get across;”
but his condition was much improved by the voyage.
He stayed six weeks at Bordeaux to improve himself in the language, and
then set out for the Mediterranean. In the diligence he had some merry
companions, and the party amused itself on the way. It was their habit
to stroll about the towns in which they stopped, and talk with whomever
they met. Among his companions was a young French officer and an
eccentric, garrulous doctor from America. At Tonneins, on the Garonne,
they entered a house where a number of girls were quilting. The girls
gave Irving a needle and set him to work. He could not understand their
patois, and they could not comprehend his bad French, and they got on
very merrily. At last the little doctor told them that the interesting
young man was an English prisoner whom the French officer had in
custody. Their merriment at once gave place to pity. “Ah! le pauvre
garcon!” said one to another; “he is merry, however, in all his
trouble.” “And what will they do with him?” asked a young woman. “Oh,
nothing of consequence,” replied the doctor; “perhaps shoot him, or cut
off his head.” The good souls were much distressed; they brought him
wine, loaded his pockets with fruit, and bade him good-by with a hundred
benedictions. Over forty years after, Irving made a detour, on his way
from Madrid to Paris, to visit Tonneins, drawn thither solely by the
recollection of this incident, vaguely hoping perhaps to apologize to
the tender-hearted villagers for the imposition. His conscience had
always pricked him for it. “It was a shame,” he said, “to leave them
with such painful impressions.” The quilting party had dispersed by that
time. “I believe I recognized the house,” he says; “and I saw two or
three old women who might once have formed part of the merry group
of girls; but I doubt whether they recognized, in the stout elderly
gentleman, thus rattling in his carriage through their streets, the pale
young English prisoner of forty years since.”
Bonaparte was emperor. The whole country was full of suspicion. The
police suspected the traveler, notwithstanding his passport, of being
an Englishman and a spy, and dogged him at every step. He arrived at
Avignon, full of enthusiasm at the thought of seeing the tomb of
Laura. “Judge of my surprise,” he writes, “my disappointment, and my
indignation, when I was told that the church, tomb, and all were utterly
demolished in the time of the Revolution. Never did the Revolution,
its authors and its consequences, receive a more hearty and sincere
execration than at that moment. Throughout the whole of my journey I
had found reason to exclaim against it for depriving me of some
valuable curiosity or celebrated monument, but this was the severest
disappointment it had yet occasioned.” This view of the Revolution is
very characteristic of Irving, and perhaps the first that would occur
to a man of letters. The journey was altogether disagreeable, even to
a traveler used to the rough jaunts in an American wilderness: the inns
were miserable; dirt, noise, and insolence reigned without control. But
it never was our author's habit to stroke the world the wrong way: “When
I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to
suit my dinner.” And he adds: “There is nothing I dread more than to be
taken for one of the Smellfungi of this world. I therefore endeavor to
be pleased with everything about me, and with the masters, mistresses,
and servants of the inns, particularly when I perceive they have 'all
the dispositions in the world' to serve me; as Sterne says, 'It is
enough for heaven and ought to be enough for me.'”
The traveler was detained at Marseilles, and five weeks at Nice, on one
or another frivolous pretext of the police, and did not reach Genoa till
the 20th of October. At Genoa there was a delightful society, and
Irving seems to have been more attracted by that than by the historical
curiosities. His health was restored, and his spirits recovered
elasticity in the genial hospitality; he was surrounded by friends to
whom he became so much attached that it was with pain he parted from
them. The gayety of city life, the levees of the Doge, and the balls,
were not unattractive to the handsome young man; but what made Genoa
seem like home to him was his intimacy with a few charming families,
among whom he mentions those of Mrs. Bird, Madame Gabriac, and Lady
Shaftesbury. From the latter he experienced the most cordial and
unreserved friendship; she greatly interested herself in his future, and
furnished him with letters from herself and the nobility to persons of
the first distinction in Florence, Rome, and Naples.
Late in December Irving sailed for Sicily in a Genoese packet. Off the
island of Planoca it was overpowered and captured by a little picaroon,
with lateen sails and a couple of guns, and a most villainous crew, in
poverty-stricken garments, rusty cutlasses in their hands and stilettos
and pistols stuck in their waistbands. The pirates thoroughly ransacked
the vessel, opened all the trunks and portmanteaus, but found little
that they wanted except brandy and provisions. In releasing the vessel,
the ragamuffins seem to have had a touch of humor, for they gave the
captain a “receipt” for what they had taken, and an order on the British
consul at Messina to pay for the same. This old-time courtesy was hardly
appreciated at the moment.
Irving passed a couple of months in Sicily, exploring with some
thoroughness the ruins, and making several perilous inland trips, for
the country was infested by banditti. One journey from Syracuse through
the center of the island revealed more wretchedness than Irving supposed
existed in the world. The half-starved peasants lived in wretched cabins
and often in caverns, amid filth and vermin. “God knows my mind never
suffered so much as on this journey,” he writes, “when I saw such
scenes of want and misery continually before me, without the power of
effectually relieving them.” His stay in the ports was made agreeable by
the officers of American ships cruising in those waters. Every ship
was a home, and every officer a friend. He had a boundless capacity for
good-fellowship. At Messina he chronicles the brilliant spectacle of
Lord Nelson's fleet passing through the straits in search of the French
fleet that had lately got out of Toulon. In less than a year Nelson's
young admirer was one of the thousands that pressed to see the remains
of the great admiral as they lay in state at Greenwich, wrapped in the
flag that had floated at the masthead of the Victory.
From Sicily he passed over to Naples in a fruit boat which dodged the
cruisers, and reached Rome the last of March. Here he remained several
weeks, absorbed by the multitudinous attractions. In Italy the worlds of
music and painting were for the first time opened to him. Here he
made the acquaintance of Washington Allston, and the influence of this
friendship came near changing the whole course of his life. To return
home to the dry study of the law was not a pleasing prospect; the
masterpieces of art, the serenity of the sky, the nameless charm which
hangs about an Italian landscape, and Allston's enthusiasm as an artist,
nearly decided him to remain in Rome and adopt the profession of a
painter. But after indulging in this dream, it occurred to him that it
was not so much a natural aptitude for the art as the lovely scenery and
Allston's companionship that had attracted him to it. He saw something
of Roman society; Torlonia the banker was especially assiduous in his
attentions. It turned out when Irving came to make his adieus that
Torlonia had all along supposed him a relative of General Washington.
This mistake is offset by another that occurred later, after Irving had
attained some celebrity in England. An English lady passing through an
Italian gallery with her daughter stopped before a bust of Washington.
The daughter said, “Mother, who was Washington?” “Why, my dear, don't
you know?” was the astonished reply. “He wrote the 'Sketch-Book.'” It
was at the house of Baron von Humboldt, the Prussian minister, that
Irving first met Madame de Stael, who was then enjoying the celebrity
of “Delphine.” He was impressed with her strength of mind, and somewhat
astounded at the amazing flow of her conversation, and the question upon
question with which she plied him.
In May the wanderer was in Paris, and remained there four months,
studying French and frequenting the theaters with exemplary regularity.
Of his life in Paris there are only the meagerest reports, and he
records no observations upon political affairs. The town fascinated
him more than any other in Europe; he notes that the city is rapidly
beautifying under the emperor, that the people seem gay and happy, and
'Vive la bagatelle!' is again the burden of their song. His excuse for
remissness in correspondence was, “I am a young man and in Paris.”
By way of the Netherlands he reached London in October, and remained in
England till January. The attraction in London seems to have been the
theater, where he saw John Kemble, Cooke, and Mrs. Siddons. Kemble's
acting seemed to him too studied and over-labored; he had the
disadvantage of a voice lacking rich bass tones. Whatever he did was
judiciously conceived and perfectly executed; it satisfied the head, but
rarely touched the heart. Only in the part of Zanga was the young critic
completely overpowered by his acting,--Kemble seemed to have forgotten
himself. Cooke, who had less range than Kemble, completely satisfied
Irving as Iago. Of Mrs. Siddons, who was then old, he scarcely dares to
give his impressions lest he should be thought extravagant. “Her looks,”
he says, “her voice; her gestures, delighted me. She penetrated in a
moment to my heart. She froze and melted it by turns; a glance of her
eye, a start, an exclamation, thrilled through my whole frame. The more
I see her, the more I admire her. I hardly breathe while she is on the
stage. She works up my feelings till I am like a mere child.” Some years
later, after the publication of the “Sketch-Book,” in a London assembly
Irving was presented to the tragedy queen, who had left the stage, but
had not laid aside its stately manner. She looked at him a moment, and
then in a deep-toned voice slowly enunciated, “You've made me weep.”
The author was so disconcerted that he said not a word, and retreated
in confusion. After the publication of “Bracebridge Hall” he met her
in company again, and was persuaded to go through the ordeal of another
presentation. The stately woman fixed her eyes on him as before, and
slowly said, “You 've made me weep again.” This time the bashful author
acquitted himself with more honor.
This first sojourn abroad was not immediately fruitful in a literary
way, and need not further detain us. It was the irresolute pilgrimage of
a man who had not yet received his vocation. Everywhere he was received
in the best society, and the charm of his manner and his ingenuous
nature made him everywhere a favorite. He carried that indefinable
passport which society recognizes and which needs no 'visee.' He saw
the people who were famous, the women whose recognition is a social
reputation; he made many valuable friends; he frequented the theater,
he indulged his passion for the opera; he learned how to dine, and
to appreciate the delights of a brilliant salon; he was picking up
languages; he was observing nature and men, and especially women. That
he profited by his loitering experience is plain enough afterward, but
thus far there is little to prophesy that Irving would be anything more
in life than a charming 'flaneur.'
IV. SOCIETY AND “SALMAGUNDI”
On Irving's return to America in February, 1806, with reestablished
health, life did not at first take on a more serious purpose. He was
admitted to the bar, but he still halted.--[Irving once illustrated
his legal acquirements at this time by the relation of the following
anecdote to his nephew: Josiah Ogden Hoffman and Martin Wilkins, an
effective and witty advocate, had been appointed to examine students for
admission. One student acquitted himself very lamely, and at the supper
which it was the custom for the candidates to give to the examiners,
when they passed upon their several merits, Hoffman paused in coming to
this one, and turning to Wilkins said, as if in hesitation, “though
all the while intending to admit him, Martin, I think he knows a little
law.”--“Make it stronger, Jo,” was the reply; “d----d little.”]--Society
more than ever attracted him and devoured his time. He willingly
accepted the office of “champion at the tea-parties;” he was one of
a knot of young fellows of literary tastes and convivial habits, who
delighted to be known as “The Nine Worthies,” or “Lads of Kilkenny.” In
his letters of this period I detect a kind of callowness and affectation
which is not discernible in his foreign letters and journal.
These social worthies had jolly suppers at the humble taverns of the
city, and wilder revelries in an old country house on the Passaic,
which is celebrated in the “Salmagundi” papers as Cockloft Hall. We are
reminded of the change of manners by a letter of Mr. Paulding, one of
his comrades, written twenty years after, who recalls to mind the keeper
of a porter house, “who whilom wore a long coat, in the pockets whereof
he jingled two bushels of sixpenny pieces, and whose daughter played
the piano to the accompaniment of broiled oysters.” There was some
affectation of roistering in all this; but it was a time of social
good-fellowship, and easy freedom of manners in both sexes. At the
dinners there was much sentimental and bacchanalian singing; it was
scarcely good manners not to get a little tipsy; and to be laid under
the table by the compulsory bumper was not to the discredit of a guest.
Irving used to like to repeat an anecdote of one of his early friends,
Henry Ogden, who had been at one of these festive meetings. He told
Irving the next day that in going home he had fallen through a grating
which had been carelessly left open, into a vault beneath. The solitude,
he said, was rather dismal at first, but several other of the guests
fell in, in the course of the evening, and they had, on the whole, a
pleasant night of it.
These young gentlemen liked to be thought “sad dogs.” That they were
less abandoned than they pretended to be the sequel of their lives
shows among Irving's associates at this time who attained honorable
consideration were John and Gouverneur Kemble, Henry Brevoort, Henry
Ogden, James K. Paulding, and Peter Irving. The saving influence for all
of them was the refined households they frequented and the association
of women who were high-spirited without prudery, and who united purity
and simplicity with wit, vivacity, and charm of manner. There is some
pleasant correspondence between Irving and Miss Mary Fairlie, a belle of
the time, who married the tragedian, Thomas A. Cooper; the “fascinating
Fairlie,” as Irving calls her, and the Sophie Sparkle of the
“Salmagundi.” Irving's susceptibility to the charms and graces of
women--a susceptibility which continued always fresh--was tempered and
ennobled by the most chivalrous admiration for the sex as a whole.
He placed them on an almost romantic pinnacle, and his actions always
conformed to his romantic ideal, although in his writings he sometimes
adopts the conventional satire which was more common fifty years ago
than now. In a letter to Miss Fairlie, written from Richmond, where he
was attending the trial of Aaron Burr, he expresses his exalted opinion
of the sex. It was said in accounting for the open sympathy of the
ladies with the prisoner that Burr had always been a favorite with them;
“but I am not inclined,” he writes, “to account for it in so illiberal
a manner; it results from that merciful, that heavenly disposition,
implanted in the female bosom, which ever inclines in favor of the
accused and the unfortunate. You will smile at the high strain in which
I have indulged; believe me, it is because I feel it; and I love your
sex ten times better than ever.”--[An amusing story in connection
with this Richmond visit illustrates the romantic phase of Irving's
character. Cooper, who was playing at the theater, needed small-clothes
for one of his parts; Irving lent him a pair,--knee breeches being still
worn,--and the actor carried them off to Baltimore. From that city he
wrote that he had found in the pocket an emblem of love, a mysterious
locket of hair in the shape of a heart. The history of it is curious:
when Irving sojourned at Genoa, he was much taken with the beauty of a
young Italian lady, the wife of a Frenchman. He had never spoken with
her, but one evening before his departure he picked up from the floor
her handkerchief which she had dropped, and with more gallantry than
honesty carried it off to Sicily. His pocket was picked of the precious
relic while he was attending a religious function in Catania, and he
wrote to his friend Storm, the consul at Genoa, deploring his loss. The
consul communicated the sad misfortune to the lovely Bianca, for that
was the lady's name, who thereupon sent him a lock of her hair, with the
request that he would come to see her on his return. He never saw her
again, but the lock of hair was inclosed in a locket and worn about
his neck, in memory of a radiant vision that had crossed his path and
vanished.]
Personally, Irving must have awakened a reciprocal admiration. A drawing
by Vanderlyn, made in Paris in 1805, and a portrait by Jarvis in 1809,
present him to us in the fresh bloom of manly beauty. The face has an
air of distinction and gentle breeding; the refined lines, the poetic
chin, the sensitive mouth, the shapely nose, the large dreamy eyes, the
intellectual forehead, and the clustering brown locks are our ideal
of the author of the “Sketch-Book” and the pilgrim in Spain. His
biographer, Mr. Pierre M. Irving, has given no description of his
appearance; but a relative, who saw much of our author in his latter
years, writes to me: “He had dark gray eyes; a handsome straight nose,
which might perhaps be called large; a broad, high, full forehead, and
a small mouth. I should call him of medium height, about five feet eight
and a half to nine inches, and inclined to be a trifle stout. There
was no peculiarity about his voice; but it was pleasant and had a good
intonation. His smile was exceedingly genial, lighting up his whole
face and rendering it very attractive; while, if he were about to say
anything humorous, it would beam forth from his eyes even before the
words were spoken. As a young man his face was exceedingly handsome,
and his head was well covered with dark hair; but from my earliest
recollection of him he wore neither whiskers nor moustache, but a
dark brown wig, which, although it made him look younger, concealed a
beautifully shaped head.” We can understand why he was a favorite in the
society of Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, and Albany, as well
as of New York, and why he liked to linger here and there, sipping the
social sweets, like a man born to leisure and seemingly idle observation
of life.
It was in the midst of these social successes, and just after his
admission to the bar, that Irving gave the first decided evidence of the
choice of a career. This was his association with his eldest brother,
William, and Paulding in the production of “Salmagundi,” a semimonthly
periodical, in small duodecimo sheets, which ran with tolerable
regularity through twenty numbers, and stopped in full tide of success,
with the whimsical indifference to the public which had characterized
its every issue. Its declared purpose was “simply to instruct the young,
reform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age.” In manner and
purpose it was an imitation of the “Spectator” and the “Citizen of the
World,” and it must share the fate of all imitations; but its wit
was not borrowed, and its humor was to some extent original; and so
perfectly was it adapted to local conditions that it may be profitably
read to-day as a not untrue reflection of the manners and spirit of
the time and city. Its amusing audacity and complacent superiority, the
mystery hanging about its writers, its affectation of indifference to
praise or profit, its fearless criticism, lively wit, and irresponsible
humor, piqued, puzzled, and delighted the town. From the first it was
an immense success; it had a circulation in other cities, and many
imitations of it sprung up. Notwithstanding many affectations and
puerilities it is still readable to Americans. Of course, if it were
offered now to the complex and sophisticated society of New York, it
would fail to attract anything like the attention it received in the
days of simplicity and literary dearth; but the same wit, insight,
and literary art, informed with the modern spirit and turned upon the
follies and “whim-whams” of the metropolis, would doubtless have a great
measure of success. In Irving's contributions to it may be traced the
germs of nearly everything that he did afterwards; in it he tried the
various stops of his genius; he discovered his own power; his career was
determined; thereafter it was only a question of energy or necessity.
In the summer of 1808 there were printed at Ballston-Spa--then the
resort of fashion and the arena of flirtation--seven numbers of a
duodecimo bagatelle in prose and verse, entitled “The Literary Picture
Gallery and Admonitory Epistles to the Visitors of Ballston-Spa, by
Simeon Senex, Esquire.” This piece of summer nonsense is not referred to
by any writer who has concerned himself about Irving's life, but
there is reason to believe that he was a contributor to it, if not
the editor.--[For these stray reminders of the old-time gayety of
Ballston-Spa, I am indebted to J. Carson Brevoort, Esq., whose father
was Irving's most intimate friend, and who told him that Irving had a
hand in them.]
In these yellow pages is a melancholy reflection of the gayety and
gallantry of the Sans Souci Hotel seventy years ago. In this “Picture
Gallery,” under the thin disguise of initials, are the portraits of
well-known belles of New York whose charms of person and graces of mind
would make the present reader regret his tardy advent into this world,
did not the “Admonitory Epistles,” addressed to the same sex, remind
him that the manners of seventy years ago left much to be desired. In
respect of the habit of swearing, “Simeon” advises “Myra” that if ladies
were to confine themselves to a single round oath, it would be quite
sufficient; and he objects, when he is at the public table, to the
conduct of his neighbor who carelessly took up “Simeon's” fork and used
it as a toothpick. All this, no doubt, passed for wit in the beginning
of the century. Punning, broad satire, exaggerated compliment, verse
which has love for its theme and the “sweet bird of Venus” for its
object, an affectation of gallantry and of ennui, with anecdotes
of distinguished visitors, out of which the screaming fun has quite
evaporated, make up the staple of these faded mementos of an ancient
watering-place. Yet how much superior is our comedy of to-day? The
beauty and the charms of the women of two generations ago exist only
in tradition; perhaps we should give to the wit of that time equal
admiration if none of it had been preserved.
Irving, notwithstanding the success of “Salmagundi,” did not immediately
devote himself to literature, nor seem to regard his achievements in
it as anything more than aids to social distinction. He was then, as
always, greatly influenced by his surroundings. These were unfavorable
to literary pursuits. Politics was the attractive field for preferment
and distinction; and it is more than probable that, even after the
success of the Knickerbocker history, he would have drifted through
life; half lawyer and half placeman, if the associations and stimulus of
an old civilization, in his second European residence, had not fired his
ambition. Like most young lawyers with little law and less clients, he
began to dabble in local politics. The experiment was not much to his
taste, and the association and work demanded, at that time, of a ward
politician soon disgusted him. “We have toiled through the purgatory
of an election,” he writes to the fair Republican, Miss Fairlie, who
rejoiced in the defeat he and the Federals had sustained.
“What makes me the more outrageous is, that I got fairly drawn into the
vortex, and before the third day was expired, I was as deep in mud and
politics as ever a moderate gentleman would wish to be; and I drank beer
with the multitude; and I talked hand-bill fashion with the demagogues;
and I shook hands with the mob, whom my heart abhorreth. 'T is true, for
the first two days I maintained my coolness and indifference. The first
day I merely hunted for whim, character, and absurdity, according to my
usual custom; the second day being rainy, I sat in the bar-room at the
Seventh Ward, and read a volume of 'Galatea,' which I found on a shelf;
but before I had got through a hundred pages, I had three or four good
Feds sprawling round me on the floor, and another with his eyes half
shut, leaning on my shoulder in the most affectionate manner, and
spelling a page of the book as if it had been an electioneering
hand-bill. But the third day--ah! then came the tug of war. My
patriotism then blazed forth, and I determined to save my country!
“Oh, my friend, I have been in such holes and corners; such filthy
nooks and filthy corners; sweep offices and oyster cellars! I have sworn
brother to a leash of drawers, and can drink with any tinker in his own
language during my life,--faugh! I shall not be able to bear the smell
of small beer and tobacco for a month to come.... Truly this saving
one's country is a nauseous piece of business, and if patriotism is such
a dirty virtue,--prythee, no more of it.”
He unsuccessfully solicited some civil appointment at Albany, a very
modest solicitation, which was never renewed, and which did not last
long, for he was no sooner there than he was “disgusted by the
servility and duplicity and rascality witnessed among the swarm of scrub
politicians.” There was a promising young artist at that time in Albany,
and Irving wishes he were a man of wealth, to give him a helping hand;
a few acts of munificence of this kind by rich nabobs, he breaks out,
“would be more pleasing in the sight of Heaven, and more to the glory
and advantage of their country, than building a dozen shingle church
steeples, or buying a thousand venal votes at an election.” This was in
the “good old times!”
Although a Federalist, and, as he described himself, “an admirer of
General Hamilton, and a partisan with him in politics,” he accepted
a retainer from Burr's friends in 1807, and attended his trial in
Richmond, but more in the capacity of an observer of the scene than a
lawyer. He did not share the prevalent opinion of Burr's treason, and
regarded him as a man so fallen as to be shorn of the power to injure
the country, one for whom he could feel nothing but compassion. That
compassion, however, he received only from the ladies of the city, and
the traits of female goodness manifested then sunk deep into Irving's
heart. Without pretending, he says, to decide on Burr's innocence
or guilt, “his situation is such as should appeal eloquently to the
feelings of every generous bosom. Sorry am I to say the reverse has been
the fact: fallen, proscribed, prejudged, the cup of bitterness has
been administered to him with an unsparing hand. It has almost been
considered as culpable to evince toward him the least sympathy or
support; and many a hollow-hearted caitiff have I seen, who basked in
the sunshine of his bounty while in power, who now skulked from his
side, and even mingled among the most clamorous of his enemies.... I bid
him farewell with a heavy heart, and he expressed with peculiar warmth
and feeling his sense of the interest I had taken in his fate. I never
felt in a more melancholy mood than when I rode from his solitary
prison.” This is a good illustration of Irving's tender-heartedness; but
considering Burr's whole character, it is altogether a womanish case of
misplaced sympathy with the cool slayer of Alexander Hamilton.
V. THE KNICKERBOCKER PERIOD
Not long after the discontinuance of “Salmagundi,” Irving, in connection
with his brother Peter, projected the work that was to make him famous.
At first nothing more was intended than a satire upon the “Picture of
New York,” by Dr. Samuel Mitchell, just then published. It was begun
as a mere burlesque upon pedantry and erudition, and was well advanced,
when Peter was called by his business to Europe, and its completion was
fortunately left to Washington. In his mind the idea expanded into a
different conception. He condensed the mass of affected learning, which
was their joint work, into five introductory chapters,--subsequently he
said it would have been improved if it had been reduced to one, and
it seems to me it would have been better if that one had been thrown
away,--and finished “A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker,”
substantially as we now have it. This was in 1809, when Irving was
twenty-six years old.
But before this humorous creation was completed, the author endured the
terrible bereavement which was to color all his life. He had formed
a deep and tender passion for Matilda Hoffman, the second daughter of
Josiah Ogden Hoffman, in whose family he had long been on a footing of
the most perfect intimacy, and his ardent love was fully reciprocated.
He was restlessly casting about for some assured means of livelihood
which would enable him to marry, and perhaps his distrust of a literary
career was connected with this desire, when after a short illness
Miss Hoffman died, in the eighteenth year of her age. Without being a
dazzling beauty, she was lovely in person and mind, with most engaging
manners, a refined sensibility, and a delicate and playful humor. The
loss was a crushing blow to Irving, from the effects of which he never
recovered, although time softened the bitterness of his grief into a
tender and sacred memory. He could never bear to hear her name spoken
even by his most intimate friends, or any allusion to her. Thirty years
after her death, it happened one evening at the house of Mr. Hoffman,
her father, that a granddaughter was playing for Mr. Irving, and in
taking her music from the drawer, a faded piece of embroidery was
brought forth. “Washington,” said Mr. Hoffman, picking it up, “this is
a piece of poor Matilda's workmanship.” The effect was electric. He had
been talking in the sprightliest mood before, but he sunk at once into
utter silence, and in a few moments got up and left the house.
After his death, in a private repository of which he always kept the
key, was found a lovely miniature, a braid of fair hair, and a slip of
paper, on which was written in his own hand, “Matilda Hoffman;” and with
these treasures were several pages of a memorandum in ink long since
faded. He kept through life her Bible and Prayer Book; they were placed
nightly under his pillow in the first days of anguish that followed her
loss, and ever after they were the inseparable companions of all
his wanderings. In this memorandum--which was written many years
afterwards--we read the simple story of his love:
“We saw each other every day, and I became excessively attached to
her. Her shyness wore off by degrees. The more I saw of her the
more I had reason to admire her. Her mind seemed to unfold leaf by
leaf, and every time to discover new sweetness. Nobody knew her so
well as I, for she was generally timid and silent; but I in a manner
studied her excellence. Never did I meet with more intuitive
rectitude of mind, more native delicacy, more exquisite propriety in
word, thought, and action, than in this young creature. I am not
exaggerating; what I say was acknowledged by all who knew her.
Her brilliant little sister used to say that people began by
admiring her, but ended by loving Matilda. For my part, I idolized
her. I felt at times rebuked by her superior delicacy and purity,
and as if I was a coarse, unworthy being in comparison.”
At this time Irving was much perplexed about his career. He had “a fatal
propensity to belles-lettres;” his repugnance to the law was such that
his mind would not take hold of the study; he anticipated nothing from
legal pursuits or political employment; he was secretly writing the
humorous history, but was altogether in a low-spirited and disheartened
state. I quote again from the memorandum:
“In the mean time I saw Matilda every day, and that helped to
distract me. In the midst of this struggle and anxiety she was
taken ill with a cold. Nothing was thought of it at first; but she
grew rapidly worse, and fell into a consumption. I cannot tell you
what I suffered. The ills that I have undergone in this life have
been dealt out to me drop by drop, and I have tasted all their
bitterness. I saw her fade rapidly away; beautiful, and more
beautiful, and more angelical to the last. I was often by her
bedside; and in her wandering state of mind she would talk to me
with a sweet, natural, and affecting eloquence, that was
overpowering. I saw more of the beauty of her mind in that
delirious state than I had ever known before. Her malady was rapid
in its career, and hurried her off in two months. Her dying
struggles were painful and protracted. For three days and nights I
did not leave the house, and scarcely slept. I was by her when she
died; all the family were assembled round her, some praying, others
weeping, for she was adored by them all. I was the last one she
looked upon. I have told you as briefly as I could what, if I were
to tell with all the incidents and feelings that accompanied it,
would fill volumes. She was but about seventeen years old when she
died.
“I cannot tell you what a horrid state of mind I was in for a long
time. I seemed to care for nothing; the world was a blank to me.
I abandoned all thoughts of the law. I went into the country, but
could not bear solitude, yet could not endure society. There was a
dismal horror continually in my mind, that made me fear to be alone.
I had often to get up in the night, and seek the bedroom of my
brother, as if the having a human being by me would relieve me from
the frightful gloom of my own thoughts.
“Months elapsed before my mind would resume any tone; but the
despondency I had suffered for a long time in the course of this
attachment, and the anguish that attended its catastrophe, seemed to
give a turn to my whole character, and throw some clouds into my
disposition, which have ever since hung about it. When I became
more calm and collected, I applied myself, by way of occupation,
to the finishing of my work. I brought it to a close, as well as I
could, and published it; but the time and circumstances in which it
was produced rendered me always unable to look upon it with
satisfaction. Still it took with the public, and gave me celebrity,
as an original work was something remarkable and uncommon in
America. I was noticed, caressed, and, for a time, elevated by the
popularity I had gained. I found myself uncomfortable in my
feelings in New York, and traveled about a little. Wherever I went,
I was overwhelmed with attentions; I was full of youth and
animation, far different from the being I now am, and I was quite
flushed with this early taste of public favor. Still, however, the
career of gayety and notoriety soon palled on me. I seemed to drift
about without aim or object, at the mercy of every breeze; my heart
wanted anchorage. I was naturally susceptible, and tried to form
other attachments, but my heart would not hold on; it would
continually recur to what it had lost; and whenever there was a
pause in the hurry of novelty and excitement, I would sink into
dismal dejection. For years I could not talk on the subject of this
hopeless regret; I could not even mention her name; but her image
was continually before me, and I dreamt of her incessantly.”
This memorandum, it subsequently appeared, was a letter, or a transcript
of it, addressed to a married lady, Mrs. Foster, in which the story of
his early love was related, in reply to her question why he had never
married. It was in the year 1823, the year after the publication of
“Bracebridge Hall,” while he sojourned in Dresden, that he became
intimate with an English family residing there, named Foster, and
conceived for the daughter, Miss Emily Foster, a warm friendship and
perhaps a deep attachment. The letter itself, which for the first time
broke the guarded seclusion of Irving's heart, is evidence of the tender
confidence that existed between him and this family. That this intimacy
would have resulted in marriage, or an offer of marriage, if the lady's
affections had not been preoccupied, the Fosters seem to have believed.
In an unauthorized addition to the “Life and Letters,” inserted in the
English edition without the knowledge of the American editor, with
some such headings as, “History of his First Love brought to us, and
returned,” and “Irving's Second Attachment,” the Fosters tell the
interesting story of Irving's life in Dresden, and give many of his
letters, and an account of his intimacy with the family. From this
account I quote:
“Soon after this, Mr. Irving, who had again for long felt 'the
tenderest interest warm his bosom, and finally enthrall his whole
soul,' made one vigorous and valiant effort to free himself from a
hopeless and consuming attachment. My mother counseled him, I
believe, for the best, and he left Dresden on an expedition of
several weeks into a country he had long wished to see; though, in
the main, it disappointed him; and he started with young Colbourne
(son of general Colbourne) as his companion. Some of his letters on
this journey are before the public; and in the agitation and
eagerness he there described, on receiving and opening letters from
us, and the tenderness in his replies,--the longing to be once more
in the little Pavilion, to which we had moved in the beginning of
the summer,--the letters (though carefully guarded by the delicacy
of her who intrusted them to the editor, and alone retained among
many more calculated to lay bare his true feelings, even fragmentary
as they are), point out the truth.
“Here is the key to the journey to Silesia, the return to Dresden,
and, finally, to the journey from Dresden to Rotterdam in our
company, first planned so as to part at Cassel, where Mr. Irving had
intended to leave us and go down the Rhine, but subsequently could
not find in his heart to part. Hence, after a night of pale and
speechless melancholy, the gay, animated, happy countenance with
which he sprang to our coach-box to take his old seat on it, and
accompany us to Rotterdam. There even could he not part, but joined
us in the steamboat; and, after bearing us company as far as a boat
could follow us, at last tore himself away, to bury himself in
Paris, and try to work....
“It was fortunate, perhaps, that this affection was returned by the
warmest friendship only, since it was destined that the
accomplishment of his wishes was impossible, for many obstacles
which lay in his way; and it is with pleasure I can truly say that
in time he schooled himself to view, also with friendship only, one
who for some time past has been the wife of another.”
Upon the delicacy of this revelation the biographer does not comment,
but he says that the idea that Irving thought of marriage at that time
is utterly disproved by the following passage from the very manuscript
which he submitted to Mrs. Foster:
“You wonder why I am not married. I have shown you why I was not
long since. When I had sufficiently recovered from that loss,
I became involved in ruin. It was not for a man broken down in the
world, to drag down any woman to his paltry circumstances. I was
too proud to tolerate the idea of ever mending my circumstances by
matrimony. My time has now gone by; and I have growing claims upon
my thoughts and upon my means, slender and precarious as they are.
I feel as if I already had a family to think and provide for.”
Upon the question of attachment and depression, Mr. Pierre Irving says:
“While the editor does not question Mr. Irving's great enjoyment of
his intercourse with the Fosters, or his deep regret at parting from
them, he is too familiar with his occasional fits of depression to
have drawn from their recurrence on his return to Paris any such
inference as that to which the lady alludes. Indeed, his memorandum
book and letters show him to have had, at this time, sources of
anxiety of quite a different nature. The allusion to his having to
put once more to sea evidently refers to his anxiety on returning to
his literary pursuits, after a season of entire idleness.”
It is not for us to question the judgment of the biographer, with his
full knowledge of the circumstances and his long intimacy with his
uncle; yet it is evident that Irving was seriously impressed at Dresden,
and that he was very much unsettled until he drove away the impression
by hard work with his pen; and it would be nothing new in human nature
and experience if he had for a time yielded to the attractions of
loveliness and a most congenial companionship, and had returned again to
an exclusive devotion to the image of the early loved and lost.
That Irving intended never to marry is an inference I cannot draw either
from his fondness for the society of women, from his interest in the
matrimonial projects of his friends and the gossip which has feminine
attractions for its food, or from his letters to those who had his
confidence. In a letter written from Birmingham, England, March 15,
1816, to his dear friend Henry Brevoort, who was permitted more than
perhaps any other person to see his secret heart, he alludes, with
gratification, to the report of the engagement of James Paulding, and
then says:
“It is what we must all come to at last. I see you are hankering
after it, and I confess I have done so for a long time past.
We are, however, past that period [Irving was thirty-two] when a man
marries suddenly and inconsiderately. We may be longer making a
choice, and consulting the convenience and concurrence of easy
circumstances, but we shall both come to it sooner or later.
I therefore recommend you to marry without delay. You have
sufficient means, connected with your knowledge and habits of
business, to support a genteel establishment, and I am certain that
as soon as you are married you will experience a change in your
ideas. All those vagabond, roving propensities will cease. They
are the offspring of idleness of mind and a want of something to fix
the feelings. You are like a bark without an anchor, that drifts
about at the mercy of every vagrant breeze or trifling eddy. Get a
wife, and she'll anchor you. But don't marry a fool because she his
a pretty face, and don't seek after a great belle. Get such a girl
as Mary----, or get her if you can; though I am afraid she has
still an unlucky kindness for poor-----, which will stand in the
way of her fortunes. I wish to God they were rich, and married, and
happy!”
The business reverses which befell the Irving brothers, and which
drove Washington to the toil of the pen, and cast upon him heavy family
responsibilities, defeated his plans of domestic happiness in marriage.
It was in this same year, 1816, when the fortunes of the firm were daily
becoming more dismal, that he wrote to Brevoort, upon the report that
the latter was likely to remain a bachelor: “We are all selfish beings.
Fortune by her tardy favors and capricious freaks seems to discourage
all my matrimonial resolves, and if I am doomed to live an old bachelor,
I am anxious to have good company. I cannot bear that all my old
companions should launch away into the married state, and leave me alone
to tread this desolate and sterile shore.” And, in view of a possible
life of scant fortune, he exclaims: “Thank Heaven, I was brought up in
simple and inexpensive habits, and I have satisfied myself that, if need
be, I can resume them without repining or inconvenience. Though I am
willing, therefore, that Fortune should shower her blessings upon me,
and think I can enjoy them as well as most men, yet I shall not make
myself unhappy if she chooses to be scanty, and shall take the position
allotted me with a cheerful and contented mind.”
When Irving passed the winter of 1823 in the charming society of the
Fosters at Dresden, the success of the “Sketch-Book” and “Bracebridge
Hall” had given him assurance of his ability to live comfortably by the
use of his pen.
To resume. The preliminary announcement of the History was a humorous
and skillful piece of advertising. Notices appeared in the newspapers
of the disappearance from his lodging of “a small, elderly gentleman,
dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of
Knickerbocker.” Paragraphs from week to week, purporting to be the
result of inquiry, elicited the facts that such an old gentleman
had been seen traveling north in the Albany stage; that his name was
Diedrich Knickerbocker; that he went away owing his landlord; and that
he left behind a very curious kind of a written book, which would be
sold to pay his bills if he did not return. So skillfully was this
managed that one of the city officials was on the point of offering a
reward for the discovery of the missing Diedrich. This little man in
knee breeches and cocked hat was the germ of the whole “Knickerbocker
legend,” a fantastic creation, which in a manner took the place of
history, and stamped upon the commercial metropolis of the New World the
indelible Knickerbocker name and character; and even now in the city
it is an undefined patent of nobility to trace descent from “an old
Knickerbocker family.”
The volume, which was first printed in Philadelphia, was put forth as a
grave history of the manners and government under the Dutch rulers, and
so far was the covert humor carried that it was dedicated to the
New York Historical Society. Its success was far beyond Irving's
expectation. It met with almost universal acclaim. It is true that some
of the old Dutch inhabitants who sat down to its perusal, expecting
to read a veritable account of the exploits of their ancestors, were
puzzled by the indirection of its commendation; and several excellent
old ladies of New York and Albany were in blazing indignation at the
ridicule put upon the old Dutch people, and minded to ostracize the
irreverent author from all social recognition. As late as 1818, in an
address before the Historical Society, Mr. Gulian C. Verplanck, Irving's
friend, showed the deep irritation the book had caused, by severe
strictures on it as a “coarse caricature.” But the author's winning
ways soon dissipated the social cloud, and even the Dutch critics were
erelong disarmed by the absence of all malice in the gigantic humor of
the composition. One of the first foreigners to recognize the power
and humor of the book was Walter Scott. “I have never,” he wrote, “read
anything so closely resembling the style of Dean Swift as the annals
of Diedrich Knickerbocker. I have been employed these few evenings in
reading them aloud to Mrs. S. and two ladies who are our guests, and our
sides have been absolutely sore with laughing. I think, too, there are
passages which indicate that the author possesses power of a different
kind, and has some touches which remind me of Sterne.”
The book is indeed an original creation, and one of the few masterpieces
of humor. In spontaneity, freshness, breadth of conception, and joyous
vigor, it belongs to the springtime of literature. It has entered into
the popular mind as no other American book ever has, and it may be said
to have created a social realm which, with all its whimsical conceit,
has almost historical solidity. The Knickerbocker pantheon is almost
as real as that of Olympus. The introductory chapters are of that
elephantine facetiousness which pleased our great-grandfathers, but
which is exceedingly tedious to modern taste; and the humor of the
book occasionally has a breadth that is indelicate to our apprehension,
though it perhaps did not shock our great-grandmothers. But,
notwithstanding these blemishes, I think the work has more enduring
qualities than even the generation which it first delighted gave it
credit for. The world, however, it must be owned, has scarcely yet
the courage of its humor, and dullness still thinks it necessary to
apologize for anything amusing. There is little doubt that Irving
himself supposed that his serious work was of more consequence to the
world.
It seems strange that after this success Irving should have hesitated to
adopt literature as his profession. But for two years, and with leisure,
he did nothing. He had again some hope of political employment in a
small way; and at length he entered into a mercantile partnership with
his brothers, which was to involve little work for him, and a share of
the profits that should assure his support, and leave him free to follow
his fitful literary inclinations. Yet he seems to have been mainly
intent upon society and the amusements of the passing hour, and, without
the spur of necessity to his literary capacity, he yielded to the
temptations of indolence, and settled into the unpromising position of
a “man about town.” Occasionally, the business of his firm and that of
other importing merchants being imperiled by some threatened action of
Congress, Irving was sent to Washington to look after their interests.
The leisurely progress he always made to the capital through the
seductive society of Philadelphia and Baltimore did not promise much
business dispatch. At the seat of government he was certain to be
involved in a whirl of gayety. His letters from Washington are more
occupied with the odd characters he met than with the measures of
legislation. These visits greatly extended his acquaintance with the
leading men of the country; his political leanings did not prevent an
intimacy with the President's family, and Mrs. Madison and he were sworn
friends.
It was of the evening of his first arrival in Washington that he writes:
“I emerged from dirt and darkness into the blazing splendor of Mrs.
Madison's drawing-room. Here I was most graciously received; found
a crowded collection of great and little men, of ugly old women and
beautiful young ones, and in ten minutes was hand and glove with half
the people in the assemblage. Mrs. Madison is a fine, portly, buxom
dame, who has a smile and a pleasant word for everybody. Her sisters,
Mrs. Cutts and Mrs. Washington, are like two merry wives of Windsor; but
as to Jemmy Madison,--oh, poor Jemmy!--he is but a withered little apple
john.”
Odd characters congregated then in Washington as now. One honest fellow,
who, by faithful fagging at the heels of Congress, had obtained a
profitable post under government, shook Irving heartily by the hand, and
professed himself always happy to see anybody that came from New York;
“somehow or another, it was natteral to him,” being the place where he
was first born. Another fellow-townsman was “endeavoring to obtain a
deposit in the Mechanics' Bank, in case the United States Bank does
not obtain a charter. He is as deep as usual; shakes his head and winks
through his spectacles at everybody he meets. He swore to me the other
day that he had not told anybody what his opinion was, whether the
bank ought to have a charter or not. Nobody in Washington knew what
his opinion was--not one--nobody; he defied any one to say what it
was--anybody--damn the one! No, sir, nobody knows;' and if he had added
nobody cares, I believe honest would have been exactly in the right.
Then there's his brother George: 'Damn that fellow,--knows eight or nine
languages; yes, sir, nine languages,--Arabic, Spanish, Greek, Ital---And
there's his wife, now,--she and Mrs. Madison are always together. Mrs.
Madison has taken a great fancy to her little daughter. Only think, sir,
that child is only six years old, and talks the Italian like a book,
by---; little devil learnt it from an Italian servant,--damned clever
fellow; lived with my brother George ten years. George says he would not
part with him for all Tripoli,'” etc.
It was always difficult for Irving, in those days, to escape from the
genial blandishments of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Writing to Brevoort
from Philadelphia, March 16, 1811, he says: “The people of Baltimore are
exceedingly social and hospitable to strangers, and I saw that if I once
let myself get into the stream, I should not be able to get out under a
fortnight at least; so, being resolved to push home as expeditiously as
was honorably possible, I resisted the world, the flesh, and the devil
at Baltimore; and after three days' and nights' stout carousal, and
a fourth's sickness, sorrow, and repentance, I hurried off from that
sensual city.”
Jarvis, the artist, was at that time the eccentric and elegant lion of
society in Baltimore. “Jack Randolph” had recently sat to him for his
portrait. “By the bye [the letter continues] that little 'hydra and
chimera dire,' Jarvis, is in prodigious circulation at Baltimore. The
gentlemen have all voted him a rare wag and most brilliant wit; and the
ladies pronounce him one of the queerest, ugliest, most agreeable
little creatures in the world. The consequence is there is not a ball,
tea-party, concert, supper, or other private regale but that Jarvis is
the most conspicuous personage; and as to a dinner, they can no more do
without him than they could without Friar John at the roystering revels
of the renowned Pantagruel.” Irving gives one of his bon mots which was
industriously repeated at all the dinner tables, a profane sally,
which seemed to tickle the Baltimoreans exceedingly. Being very much
importuned to go to church, he resolutely refused, observing that it was
the same thing whether he went or stayed at home. “If I don't go,” said
he, “the minister says I 'll be d---d, and I 'll be d---d if I do go.”
This same letter contains a pretty picture, and the expression of
Irving's habitual kindly regard for his fellow-men:
“I was out visiting with Ann yesterday, and met that little
assemblage of smiles and fascinations, Mary Jackson. She was
bounding with youth, health, and innocence, and good humor. She had
a pretty straw hat, tied under her chin with a pink ribbon, and
looked like some little woodland nymph, just turned out by spring
and fine weather. God bless her light heart, and grant it may never
know care or sorrow! It's enough to cure spleen and melancholy only
to look at her.
“Your familiar pictures of home made me extremely desirous again to
be there.... I shall once more return to sober life,
satisfied with having secured three months of sunshine in this
valley of shadows and darkness. In this space of time I have seen
considerable of the world, but I am sadly afraid I have not grown
wiser thereby, inasmuch as it has generally been asserted by the
sages of every age that wisdom consists in a knowledge of the
wickedness of mankind, and the wiser a man grows the more
discontented he becomes with those around him. Whereas, woe is me,
I return in infinitely better humor with the world than I ever was
before, and with a most melancholy good opinion and good will for
the great mass of my fellow-creatures!”
Free intercourse with men of all parties, he thought, tends to divest a
man's mind of party bigotry.
“One day [he writes] I am dining with a knot of honest, furious
Federalists, who are damning all their opponents as a set of
consummate scoundrels, panders of Bonaparte, etc. The next day I
dine, perhaps, with some of the very men I have heard thus
anathematized, and find them equally honest, warm, and indignant;
and if I take their word for it, I had been dining the day before
with some of the greatest knaves in the nation, men absolutely paid
and suborned by the British government.”
His friends at this time attempted to get him appointed secretary of
legation to the French mission, under Joel Barlow, then minister, but
he made no effort to secure the place. Perhaps he was deterred by the
knowledge that the author of “The Columbiad” suspected him, though
unjustly, of some strictures on his great epic. He had in mind a book
of travel in his own country, in which he should sketch manners and
characters; but nothing came of it. The peril to trade involved in the
War of 1812 gave him some forebodings, and aroused him to exertion.
He accepted the editorship of a periodical called “Select Reviews,”
afterwards changed to the “Analectic Magazine,” for which he wrote
sketches, some of which were afterwards put into the “Sketch-Book,”
and several reviews and naval biographies. A brief biography of Thomas
Campbell was also written about this time, as introductory to an edition
of “Gertrude of Wyoming.” But the slight editorial care required by the
magazine was irksome to a man who had an unconquerable repugnance to all
periodical labor.
In 1813 Francis Jeffrey made a visit to the United States. Henry
Brevoort, who was then in London, wrote an anxious letter to Irving to
impress him with the necessity of making much of Mr. Jeffrey. “It is
essential,” he says,--“that Jeffrey may imbibe a just estimate of the
United States and its inhabitants; he goes out strongly biased in our
favor, and the influence of his good opinion upon his return to this
country will go far to efface the calumnies and the absurdities that
have been laid to our charge by ignorant travelers. Persuade him to
visit Washington, and by all means to see the Falls of Niagara.” The
impression seems to have prevailed that if Englishmen could be made to
take a just view of the Falls of Niagara, the misunderstandings between
the two countries would be reduced. Peter Irving, who was then in
Edinburgh, was impressed with the brilliant talent of the editor of the
“Review,” disguised as it was by affectation, but he said he “would not
give the Minstrel for a wilderness of Jeffreys.”
The years from 1811 to 1815, when he went abroad for the second time,
were passed by Irving in a sort of humble waiting on Providence.
His letters to Brevoort during this period are full of the ennui of
irresolute youth. He idled away weeks and months in indolent enjoyment
in the country; he indulged his passion for the theater when opportunity
offered; and he began to be weary of a society which offered little
stimulus to his mind. His was the temperament of the artist, and America
at that time had little to evoke or to satisfy the artistic feeling.
There were few pictures and no galleries; there was no music, except the
amateur torture of strings which led the country dance, or the martial
inflammation of fife and drum, or the sentimental dawdling here and
there over the ancient harpsichord, with the songs of love, and the
broad or pathetic staves and choruses of the convivial table; and there
was no literary atmosphere.
After three months of indolent enjoyment in the winter and spring of
1811, Irving is complaining to Brevoort in June of the enervation of his
social life: “I do want most deplorably to apply my mind to something
that will arouse and animate it; for at present it is very indolent and
relaxed, and I find it very difficult to shake off the lethargy that
enthralls it. This makes me restless and dissatisfied with myself, and I
am convinced I shall not feel comfortable and contented until my mind
is fully employed. Pleasure is but a transient stimulus, and leaves
the mind more enfeebled than before. Give me rugged toils, fierce
disputation, wrangling controversy, harassing research,--give me
anything that calls forth the energies of the mind; but for Heaven's
sake shield me from those calms, those tranquil slumberings, those
enervating triflings, those siren blandishments, that I have for some
time indulged in, which lull the mind into complete inaction, which
benumb its powers, and cost it such painful and humiliating struggles to
regain its activity and independence!”
Irving at this time of life seemed always waiting by the pool for some
angel to come and trouble the waters. To his correspondent, who was
in the wilds of Michilimackinac, he continues to lament his morbid
inability. The business in which his thriving brothers were engaged was
the importation and sale of hardware and cutlery, and that spring his
services were required at the “store.” “By all the martyrs of Grub
Street [he exclaims], I 'd sooner live in a garret, and starve into the
bargain, than follow so sordid, dusty, and soul-killing a way of life,
though certain it would make me as rich as old Croesus, or John Jacob
Astor himself!” The sparkle of society was no more agreeable to him than
the rattle of cutlery. “I have scarcely [he writes] seen anything
of the ------s since your departure; business and an amazing want of
inclination have kept me from their threshold. Jim, that sly poacher,
however, prowls about there, and vitrifies his heart by the furnace of
their charms. I accompanied him there on Sunday evening last, and found
the Lads and Miss Knox with them. S----was in great spirits, and played
the sparkler with such great success as to silence the whole of us
excepting Jim, who was the agreeable rattle of the evening. God defend
me from such vivacity as hers, in future,--such smart speeches without
meaning, such bubble and squeak nonsense! I 'd as lieve stand by a
frying-pan for an hour and listen to the cooking of apple fritters.
After two hours' dead silence and suffering on my part I made out to
drag him off, and did not stop running until I was a mile from the
house.” Irving gives his correspondent graphic pictures of the
social warfare in which he was engaged, the “host of rascally little
tea-parties” in which he was entangled; and some of his portraits of the
“divinities,” the “blossoms,” and the beauties of that day would make
the subjects of them flutter with surprise in the churchyards where they
lie. The writer was sated with the “tedious commonplace of fashionable
society,” and languishing to return to his books and his pen.
In March, 18122, in the shadow of the war and the depression of
business, Irving was getting out a new edition of the “Knickerbocker,”
which Inskeep was to publish, agreeing to pay $1200 at six months for an
edition of fifteen hundred. The modern publisher had not then arisen
and acquired a proprietary right in the brains of the country, and the
author made his bargains like an independent being who owned himself.
Irving's letters of this period are full of the gossip of the town and
the matrimonial fate of his acquaintances. The fascinating Mary Fairlie
is at length married to Cooper, the tragedian, with the opposition
of her parents, after a dismal courtship and a cloudy prospect of
happiness. Goodhue is engaged to Miss Clarkson, the sister to the pretty
one. The engagement suddenly took place as they walked from church on
Christmas Day, and report says “the action was shorter than any of our
naval victories, for the lady struck on the first broadside.” The war
colored all social life and conversation. “This war [the letter is to
Brevoort, who is in Europe] has completely changed the face of things
here. You would scarcely recognize our old peaceful city. Nothing is
talked of but armies, navies, battles, etc.” The same phenomenon was
witnessed then that was observed in the war for the Union: “Men who had
loitered about, the hangers-on and encumbrances of society, have all at
once risen to importance, and been the only useful men of the day.” The
exploits of our young navy kept up the spirits of the country. There was
great rejoicing when the captured frigate Macedonian was brought into
New York, and was visited by the curious as she lay wind-bound above
Hell Gate. “A superb dinner was given to the naval heroes, at which
all the great eaters and drinkers of the city were present. It was the
noblest entertainment of the kind I ever witnessed. On New Year's Eve a
grand ball was likewise given, where there was a vast display of great
and little people. The Livingstons were there in all their glory. Little
Rule Britannia made a gallant appearance at the head of a train of
beauties, among whom were the divine H----, who looked very inviting,
and the little Taylor, who looked still more so. Britannia was
gorgeously dressed in a queer kind of hat of stiff purple and silver
stuff, that had marvelously the appearance of copper, and made us
suppose that she had procured the real Mambrino helmet. Her dress was
trimmed with what we simply mistook for scalps, and supposed it was in
honor of the nation; but we blushed at our ignorance on discovering
that it was a gorgeous trimming of marten tips. Would that some eminent
furrier had been there to wonder and admire!”
With a little business and a good deal of loitering, waiting upon the
whim of his pen, Irving passed the weary months of the war. As late as
August, 1814, he is still giving Brevoort, who has returned, and is
at Rockaway Beach, the light gossip of the town. It was reported that
Brevoort and Dennis had kept a journal of their foreign travel, “which
is so exquisitely humorous that Mrs. Cooper, on only looking at the
first word, fell into a fit of laughing that lasted half an hour.”
Irving is glad that he cannot find Brevoort's flute, which the latter
requested should be sent to him: “I do not think it would be an innocent
amusement for you, as no one has a right to entertain himself at the
expense of others.” In such dallying and badinage the months went
on, affairs every day becoming more serious. Appended to a letter of
September 9, 1814, is a list of twenty well-known mercantile houses that
had failed within the preceding three weeks. Irving himself, shortly
after this, enlisted in the war, and his letters thereafter breathe
patriotic indignation at the insulting proposals of the British and
their rumored attack on New York, and all his similes, even those having
love for their subject, are martial and bellicose. Item: “The gallant
Sam has fairly changed front, and, instead of laying siege to Douglas
castle, has charged sword in hand, and carried little Cooper's'
entrenchments.”
As a Federalist and an admirer of England, Irving had deplored the war,
but his sympathies were not doubtful after it began, and the burning
of the national Capitol by General Ross aroused him to an active
participation in the struggle. He was descending the Hudson in a
steamboat when the tidings first reached him. It was night, and the
passengers had gone into the cabin, when a man came on board with the
news, and in the darkness related the particulars: the burning of the
President's house and government offices, and the destruction of the
Capitol, with the library and public archives. In the momentary silence
that followed, somebody raised his voice, and in a tone of complacent
derision “wondered what Jimmy Madison would say now.” “Sir,” cried Mr.
Irving, in a burst of indignation that overcame his habitual shyness,
“do you seize upon such a disaster only for a sneer? Let me tell you,
sir, it is not now a question about Jimmy Madison or Jimmy Armstrong.
The pride and honor of the nation are wounded; the country is insulted
and disgraced by this barbarous success, and every loyal citizen would
feel the ignominy and be earnest to avenge it.” There was an outburst
of applause, and the sneerer was silenced. “I could not see the fellow,”
said Mr. Irving, in relating the anecdote, “but I let fly at him in the
dark.”
The next day he offered his services to Governor Tompkins, and was
made the governor's aid and military secretary, with the right to be
addressed as Colonel Washington Irving. He served only four months in
this capacity, when Governor Tompkins was called to the session of the
legislature at Albany. Irving intended to go to Washington and apply for
a commission in the regular army, but he was detained at Philadelphia by
the affairs of his magazine, until news came in February, 1815, of the
close of the war. In May of that year he embarked for England to
visit his brother, intending only a short sojourn. He remained abroad
seventeen years.
VI. LIFE IN EUROPE--LITERARY ACTIVITY
When Irving sailed from New York, it was with lively anticipations of
witnessing the stirring events to follow the return of Bonaparte from
Elba. When he reached Liverpool, the curtain had fallen in Bonaparte's
theater. The first spectacle that met the traveler's eye was the mail
coaches, darting through the streets, decked with laurel and bringing
the news of Waterloo. As usual, Irving's sympathies were with the
unfortunate. “I think,” he says, writing of the exile of St. Helena,
“the cabinet has acted with littleness toward him. In spite of all
his misdeeds he is a noble fellow [pace Madame de Remusat], and I
am confident will eclipse, in the eyes of posterity, all the crowned
wiseacres that have crushed him by their overwhelming confederacy. If
anything could place the Prince Regent in a more ridiculous light, it is
Bonaparte suing for his magnanimous protection. Every compliment paid to
this bloated sensualist, this inflation of sack and sugar, turns to the
keenest sarcasm.”
After staying a week with his brother Peter, who was recovering from
an indisposition, Irving went to Birmingham, the residence of his
brother-in-law, Henry Van Wart, who had married his youngest sister,
Sarah; and from thence to Sydenham, to visit Campbell. The poet was not
at home. To Mrs. Campbell Irving expressed his regret that her husband
did not attempt something on a grand scale.
“'It is unfortunate for Campbell,' said she, 'that he lives in the
same age with Scott and Byron.' I asked why. 'Oh,' said she, 'they
write so much and so rapidly. Mr. Campbell writes slowly, and it
takes him some time to get under way; and just as he has fairly
begun out comes one of their poems, that sets the world agog, and
quite daunts him, so that he throws by his pen in despair.'
I pointed out the essential difference in their kinds of poetry, and
the qualities which insured perpetuity to that of her husband. 'You
can't persuade Campbell of that,' said she. 'He is apt to
undervalue his own works, and to consider his own little lights put
out, whenever they come blazing out with their great torches.'
“I repeated the conversation to Scott some time afterward, and it
drew forth a characteristic comment. 'Pooh!' said he, good
humoredly; 'how can Campbell mistake the matter so much? Poetry
goes by quality, not by bulk. My poems are mere Cairngorms, wrought
up, perhaps, with a cunning hand, and may pass well in the market as
long as Cairngorms are the fashion; but they are mere Scotch
pebbles, after all. Now, Tom Campbell's are real diamonds, and
diamonds of the first water.'”
Returning to Birmingham, Irving made excursions to Kenilworth, Warwick,
and Stratford-on-Avon, and a tour through Wales with James Renwick, a
young American of great promise, who at the age of nineteen had for a
time filled the chair of natural philosophy in Columbia College. He was
a son of Mrs. Jane Renwick, a charming woman and a lifelong friend of
Irving, the daughter of the Rev. Andrew Jeffrey, of Lochmaben, Scotland,
and famous in literature as “The Blue-Eyed Lassie” of Burns. From
another song, “When first I saw my Face,” which does not appear in the
poet's collected works, the biographer quotes:
“But, sair, I doubt some happier swain
Has gained my Jeanie's favor;
If sae, may every bliss be hers,
Tho' I can never have her.
“But gang she east, or gang she west,
'Twixt Nith and Tweed all over,
While men have eyes, or ears, or taste,
She'll always find a lover.”
During Irving's protracted stay in England he did not by any means lose
his interest in his beloved New York and the little society that was
always dear to him. He relied upon his friend Brevoort to give him the
news of the town, and in return he wrote long letters,--longer and more
elaborate and formal than this generation has leisure to write or to
read; letters in which the writer laid himself out to be entertaining,
and detailed his emotions and state of mind as faithfully as his travels
and outward experiences.
No sooner was our war with England over than our navy began to make a
reputation for itself in the Mediterranean. In his letter of August,
1815, Irving dwells with pride on Decatur's triumph over the Algerine
pirates. He had just received a letter from “that--worthy little
tar, Jack Nicholson,” dated on board the Flambeau, off Algiers. In it
Nicholson says that “they fell in with and captured the admiral's ship,
and killed him.” Upon which Irving remarks: “As this is all that Jack's
brevity will allow him to say on the subject, I should be at a loss to
know whether they killed the admiral before or after his capture. The
well-known humanity of our tars, however, induces me to the former
conclusion.” Nicholson, who has the honor of being alluded to in “The
Croakers,” was always a great favorite with Irving. His gallantry on
shore was equal to his bravery at sea, but unfortunately his diffidence
was greater than his gallantry; and while his susceptibility to female
charms made him an easy and a frequent victim, he could never muster
the courage to declare his passion. Upon one occasion, when he was
desperately enamored of a lady whom he wished to marry, he got Irving to
write for him a love-letter, containing an offer of his heart and hand.
The enthralled but bashful sailor carried the letter in his pocket
till it was worn out, without ever being able to summon pluck enough to
deliver it.
While Irving was in Wales the Wiggins family and Madame Bonaparte
passed through Birmingham, on their way to Cheltenham. Madame was still
determined to assert her rights as a Bonaparte. Irving cannot help
expressing sympathy for Wiggins: “The poor man has his hands full, with
such a bevy of beautiful women under his charge, and all doubtless bent
on pleasure and admiration.” He hears, however, nothing further of her,
except the newspapers mention her being at Cheltenham. “There are so
many stars and comets thrown out of their orbits, and whirling about the
world at present, that a little star like Madame Bonaparte attracts but
slight attention, even though she draw after her so sparkling a tail as
the Wiggins family.” In another letter he exclaims: “The world is surely
topsy-turvy, and its inhabitants shaken out of place: emperors and
kings, statesmen and philosophers, Bonaparte, Alexander, Johnson, and
the Wigginses, all strolling about the face of the earth.”
The business of the Irving brothers soon absorbed all Washington's
time and attention. Peter was an invalid, and the whole weight of the
perplexing affairs of the failing firm fell upon the one who detested
business, and counted every hour lost that he gave to it. His letters
for two years are burdened with harassments in uncongenial details and
unsuccessful struggles. Liverpool, where he was compelled to pass most
of his time, had few attractions for him, and his low spirits did not
permit him to avail himself of such social advantages as were offered.
It seems that our enterprising countrymen flocked abroad, on the
conclusion of peace. “This place [writes Irving] swarms with Americans.
You never saw a more motley race of beings. Some seem as if just from
the woods, and yet stalk about the streets and public places with all
the easy nonchalance that they would about their own villages. Nothing
can surpass the dauntless independence of all form, ceremony, fashion,
or reputation of a downright, unsophisticated American. Since the war,
too, particularly, our lads seem to think they are 'the salt of the
earth' and the legitimate lords of creation. It would delight you to
see some of them playing Indian when surrounded by the wonders and
improvements of the Old World. It is impossible to match these fellows
by anything this side the water. Let an Englishman talk of the battle of
Waterloo, and they will immediately bring up New Orleans and Plattsburg.
“A thoroughbred, thoroughly appointed soldier is nothing to a Kentucky
rifleman,” etc., etc. In contrast to this sort of American was Charles
King, who was then abroad: “Charles is exactly what an American should
be abroad: frank, manly, and unaffected in his habits and manners,
liberal and independent in his opinions, generous and unprejudiced in
his sentiments towards other nations, but most loyally attached to his
own.” There was a provincial narrowness at that date and long after
in America, which deprecated the open-minded patriotism of King and of
Irving as it did the clear-sighted loyalty of Fenimore Cooper.
The most anxious time of Irving's life was the winter of 1815-16. The
business worry increased. He was too jaded with the din of pounds,
shillings, and pence to permit his pen to invent facts or to adorn
realities. Nevertheless, he occasionally escapes from the treadmill. In
December he is in London, and entranced with the acting of Miss O'Neil.
He thinks that Brevoort, if he saw her, would infallibly fall in love
with this “divine perfection of a woman.” He writes: “She is, to my
eyes, the most soul-subduing actress I ever saw; I do not mean from her
personal charms, which are great, but from the truth, force, and pathos
of her acting. I have never been so completely melted, moved, and
overcome at a theatre as by her performances.... Kean, the prodigy,
is to me insufferable. He is vulgar, full of trick, and a complete
mannerist. This is merely my opinion. He is cried up as a second
Garrick, as a reformer of the stage, etc. It may be so. He may be right,
and all the other actors wrong. This is certain: he is either very good
or very bad. I think decidedly the latter; and I find no medium opinions
concerning him. I am delighted with Young, who acts with great judgment,
discrimination, and feeling. I think him much the best actor at present
on the English stage.... In certain characters, such as may be classed
with Macbeth, I do not think that Cooper has his equal in England. Young
is the only actor I have seen who can compare with him.” Later, Irving
somewhat modified his opinion of Kean. He wrote to Brevoort: “Kean is
a strange compound of merits and defects. His excellence consists
in sudden and brilliant touches, in vivid exhibitions of passion and
emotion. I do not think him a discriminating actor, or critical either
at understanding or delineating character; but he produces effects which
no other actor does.”
In the summer of 1816, on his way from Liverpool to visit his sister's
family at Birmingham, Irving tarried for a few days at a country place
near Shrewsbury on the border of Wales, and while there encountered
a character whose portrait is cleverly painted. It is interesting to
compare this first sketch with the elaboration of it in the essay on
“The Angler” in the “Sketch-Book.”
“In one of our morning strolls [he writes, July 15] along the banks
of the Aleen, a beautiful little pastoral stream that rises among
the Welsh mountains and throws itself into the Dee, we encountered a
veteran angler of old Isaac Walton's school. He was an old
Greenwich outdoor pensioner, had lost one leg in the battle of
Camperdown, had been in America in his youth, and indeed had been
quite a rover, but for many years past had settled himself down in
his native village, not far distant, where he lived very
independently on his pension and some other small annual sums,
amounting in all to about L 40. His great hobby, and indeed the
business of his life, was to angle. I found he had read Isaac
Walton very attentively; he seemed to have imbibed all his
simplicity of heart, contentment of mind, and fluency of tongue.
We kept company with him almost the whole day, wandering along the
beautiful banks of the river, admiring the ease and elegant
dexterity with which the old fellow managed his angle, throwing the
fly with unerring certainty at a great distance and among
overhanging bushes, and waving it gracefully in the air, to keep it
from entangling, as he stumped with his staff and wooden leg from
one bend of the river to another. He kept up a continual flow of
cheerful and entertaining talk, and what I particularly liked him
for was, that though we tried every way to entrap him into some
abuse of America and its inhabitants, there was no getting him to
utter an ill-natured word concerning us. His whole conversation and
deportment illustrated old Isaac's maxims as to the benign influence
of angling over the human heart.... I ought to mention that
he had two companions--one, a ragged, picturesque varlet, that had
all the air of a veteran poacher, and I warrant would find any
fish-pond in the neighborhood in the darkest night; the other was a
disciple of the old philosopher, studying the art under him, and was
son and heir apparent to the landlady of the village tavern.”
A contrast to this pleasing picture is afforded by some character
sketches at the little watering-place of Buxton, which our kindly
observer visited the same year.
“At the hotel where we put up [he writes] we had a most singular and
whimsical assemblage of beings. I don't know whether you were ever
at an English watering-place, but if you have not been, you have
missed the best opportunity of studying English oddities, both moral
and physical. I no longer wonder at the English being such
excellent caricaturists, they have such an inexhaustible number and
variety of subjects to study from. The only care should be not to
follow fact too closely, for I 'll swear I have met with characters
and figures that would be condemned as extravagant, if faithfully
delineated by pen or pencil. At a watering-place like Buxton, where
people really resort for health, you see the great tendency of the
English to run into excrescences and bloat out into grotesque
deformities. As to noses, I say nothing of them, though we had
every variety: some snubbed and turned up, with distended nostrils,
like a dormer window on the roof of a house; others convex and
twisted like a buck-handled knife; and others magnificently
efflorescent, like a full-blown cauliflower. But as to the persons
that were attached to these noses, fancy any distortion,
protuberance, and fungous embellishment that can be produced in the
human form by high and gross feeding, by the bloating operations of
malt liquors, and by the rheumy influence of a damp, foggy, vaporous
climate. One old fellow was an exception to this, for instead of
acquiring that expansion and sponginess to which old people are
prone in this country, from the long course of internal and external
soakage they experience, he had grown dry and stiff in the process
of years. The skin of his face had so shrunk away that he could not
close eyes or mouth--the latter, therefore, stood on a perpetual
ghastly grin, and the former on an incessant stare. He had but one
serviceable joint in his body, which was at the bottom of the
backbone, and that creaked and grated whenever he bent. He could
not raise his feet from the ground, but skated along the
drawing-room carpet whenever he wished to ring the bell. The only
sign of moisture in his whole body was a pellucid drop that I
occasionally noticed on the end of along, dry nose. He used
generally to shuffle about in company with a little fellow that was
fat on one side and lean on the other. That is to say, he was
warped on one side as if he had been scorched before the fire; he
had a wry neck, which made his head lean on one shoulder; his hair
was smugly powdered, and he had a round, smirking, smiling, apple
face, with a bloom on it like that of a frostbitten leaf in autumn.
We had an old, fat general by the name of Trotter, who had, I
suspect, been promoted to his high rank to get him out of the way
of more able and active officers, being an instance that a man may
occasionally rise in the world through absolute lack of merit. I
could not help watching the movements of this redoubtable old Hero,
who, I'll warrant, has been the champion and safeguard of half the
garrison towns in England, and fancying to myself how Bonaparte
would have delighted in having such toast-and-butter generals to
deal with. This old cad is doubtless a sample of those generals
that flourished in the old military school, when armies would
manoeuvre and watch each other for months; now and then have a
desperate skirmish, and, after marching and countermarching about
the 'Low Countries' through a glorious campaign, retire on the
first pinch of cold weather into snug winter quarters in some fat
Flemish town, and eat and drink and fiddle through the winter.
Boney must have sadly disconcerted the comfortable system of these
old warriors by the harrowing, restless, cut-and-slash mode of
warfare that he introduced. He has put an end to all the old carte
and tierce system in which the cavaliers of the old school fought
so decorously, as it were with a small sword in one hand and a
chapeau bras in the other. During his career there has been a sad
laying on the shelf of old generals who could not keep up with the
hurry, the fierceness and dashing of the new system; and among the
number I presume has been my worthy house-mate, old Trotter. The
old gentleman, in spite of his warlike title, had a most pacific
appearance. He was large and fat, with a broad, hazy, muffin face,
a sleepy eye, and a full double chin. He had a deep ravine from
each corner of his mouth, not occasioned by any irascible
contraction of the muscles, but apparently the deep-worn channels
of two rivulets of gravy that oozed out from the huge mouthfuls
that he masticated. But I forbear to dwell on the odd beings that
were congregated together in one hotel. I have been thus prolix
about the old general because you desired me in one of your letters
to give you ample details whenever I happened to be in company with
the 'great and glorious,' and old Trotter is more deserving of the
epithet than any of the personages I have lately encountered.”
It was at the same resort of fashion and disease that Irving observed
a phenomenon upon which Brevoort had commented as beginning to be
noticeable in America.
“Your account [he writes of the brevity of the old lady's nether
garments] distresses me.... I cannot help observing that this
fashion of short skirts must have been invented by the French ladies
as a complete trick upon John Bull's 'woman-folk.' It was
introduced just at the time the English flocked in such crowds to
Paris. The French women, you know, are remarkable for pretty feet
and ankles, and can display them in perfect security. The English
are remarkable for the contrary. Seeing the proneness of the
English women to follow French fashions, they therefore led them
into this disastrous one, and sent them home with their petticoats
up to their knees, exhibiting such a variety of sturdy little legs
as would have afforded Hogarth an ample choice to match one of his
assemblages of queer heads. It is really a great source of
curiosity and amusement on the promenade of a watering-place to
observe the little sturdy English women, trudging about in their
stout leather shoes, and to study the various 'understandings'
betrayed to view by this mischievous fashion.”
The years passed rather wearily in England. Peter continued to be an
invalid, and Washington himself, never robust, felt the pressure more
and more of the irksome and unprosperous business affairs. Of his own
want of health, however, he never complains; he maintains a patient
spirit in the ill turns of fortune, and his impatience in the business
complications is that of a man hindered from his proper career. The
times were depressing.
“In America [he writes to Brevoort] you have financial difficulties,
the embarrassments of trade, the distress of merchants, but here you
have what is far worse, the distress of the poor--not merely mental
sufferings, but the absolute miseries of nature: hunger, nakedness,
wretchedness of all kinds that the laboring people in this country
are liable to. In the best of times they do but subsist, but in
adverse times they starve. How the country is to extricate itself
from its present embarrassment, how it is to escape from the poverty
that seems to be overwhelming it, and how the government is to quiet
the multitudes that are already turbulent and clamorous, and are yet
but in the beginning of their real miseries, I cannot conceive.”
The embarrassments of the agricultural and laboring classes and of the
government were as serious in 1816 as they have again become in 1881.
During 1817 Irving was mostly in the depths of gloom, a prey to the
monotony of life and torpidity of intellect. Rays of sunlight pierce the
clouds occasionally. The Van Wart household at Birmingham was a frequent
refuge for him, and we have pretty pictures of the domestic life there;
glimpses of Old Parr, whose reputation as a gourmand was only second
to his fame as a Grecian, and of that delightful genius, the Rev. Rann
Kennedy, who might have been famous if he had ever committed to paper
the long poems that he carried about in his head, and the engaging sight
of Irving playing the flute for the little Van Warts to dance. During
the holidays Irving paid another visit to the haunts of Isaac Walton,
and his description of the adventures and mishaps of a pleasure party on
the banks of the Dove suggest that the incorrigible bachelor was still
sensitive to the allurements of life; and liable to wander over the
“dead-line” of matrimonial danger. He confesses that he was all day in
Elysium. “When we had descended from the last precipice,” he says,
“and come to where the Dove flowed musically through a verdant
meadow--then--fancy me, oh, thou 'sweetest of poets,' wandering by
the course of this romantic stream--a lovely girl hanging on my arm,
pointing out the beauties of the surrounding scenery, and repeating
in the most dulcet voice tracts of heaven-born poetry. If a strawberry
smothered in cream has any consciousness of its delicious situation, it
must feel as I felt at that moment.” Indeed, the letters of this doleful
year are enlivened by so many references to the graces and attractions
of lovely women, seen and remembered, that insensibility cannot be
attributed to the author of the “Sketch-Book.”
The death of Irving's mother in the spring of 1817 determined him to
remain another year abroad. Business did not improve. His brother-in-law
Van Wart called a meeting of his creditors, the Irving brothers
floundered on into greater depths of embarrassment, and Washington, who
could not think of returning home to face poverty in New York, began to
revolve a plan that would give him a scanty but sufficient support.
The idea of the “Sketch-Book” was in his mind. He had as yet made few
literary acquaintances in England. It is an illustration of the warping
effect of friendship upon the critical faculty that his opinion of Moore
at this time was totally changed by subsequent intimacy. At a later date
the two authors became warm friends and mutual admirers of each other's
productions. In June, 1817, “Lalla Rookh” was just from the press, and
Irving writes to Brevoort: “Moore's new poem is just out. I have not
sent it to you, for it is dear and worthless. It is written in the most
effeminate taste, and fit only to delight boarding-school girls and lads
of nineteen just in their first loves. Moore should have kept to songs
and epigrammatic conceits. His stream of intellect is too small to
bear expansion--it spreads into mere surface.” Too much cream for the
strawberry!
Notwithstanding business harassments in the summer and fall of 1817 he
found time for some wandering about the island; he was occasionally in
London, dining at Murray's, where he made the acquaintance of the elder
D'Israeli and other men of letters (one of his notes of a dinner at
Murray's is this: “Lord Byron told Murray that he was much happier after
breaking with Lady Byron--he hated this still, quiet life”); he was
publishing a new edition of the “Knickerbocker,” illustrated by Leslie
and Allston; and we find him at home in the friendly and brilliant
society of Edinburgh; both the magazine publishers, Constable and
Blackwood, were very civil to him, and Mr. Jeffrey (Mrs. Renwick was his
sister) was very attentive; and he passed some days with Walter Scott,
whose home life he so agreeably describes in his sketch of “Abbotsford.”
He looked back longingly to the happy hours there (he writes to his
brother): “Scott reading, occasionally, from 'Prince Arthur;' telling
border stories or characteristic ancedotes; Sophy Scott singing with
charming 'naivete' a little border song; the rest of the family disposed
in listening groups, while greyhounds, spaniels, and cats bask in
unbounded indulgence before the fire. Everything about Scott is perfect
character and picture.”
In the beginning of 1818 the business affairs of the brothers became
so irretrievably involved that Peter and Washington went through
the humiliating experience of taking the bankrupt act. Washington's
connection with the concern was little more than nominal, and he felt
small anxiety for himself, and was eager to escape from an occupation
which had taken all the elasticity out of his mind. But on account of
his brothers, in this dismal wreck of a family connection, his soul was
steeped in bitterness. Pending the proceedings of the commissioners, he
shut himself up day and night to the study of German, and while waiting
for the examination used to walk up and down the room, conning over the
German verbs.
In August he went up to London and cast himself irrevocably upon the
fortune of his pen. He had accumulated some materials, and upon these he
set to work. Efforts were made at home to procure for him the position
of Secretary of Legation in London, which drew from him the remark,
when they came to his knowledge, that he did not like to have his name
hackneyed about among the office-seekers in Washington. Subsequently his
brother William wrote him that Commodore Decatur was keeping open
for him the office of Chief Clerk in the Navy Department. To the
mortification and chagrin of his brothers, Washington declined the
position. He was resolved to enter upon no duties that would interfere
with his literary pursuits.
This resolution, which exhibited a modest confidence in his own powers,
and the energy with which he threw himself into his career, showed the
fiber of the man. Suddenly, by the reverse of fortune, he who had been
regarded as merely the ornamental genius of the family became its stay
and support. If he had accepted the aid of his brothers, during the
experimental period of his life, in the loving spirit of confidence in
which it was given, he was not less ready to reverse the relations when
the time came; the delicacy with which his assistance was rendered, the
scrupulous care taken to convey the feeling that his brothers were
doing him a continued favor in sharing his good fortune, and their
own unjealous acceptance of what they would as freely have given if
circumstances had been different, form one of the pleasantest instances
of brotherly concord and self-abnegation. I know nothing more admirable
than the lifelong relations of this talented and sincere family.
Before the “Sketch-Book” was launched, and while Irving was casting
about for the means of livelihood, Walter Scott urged him to take the
editorship of an anti-Jacobin periodical in Edinburgh. This he declined
because he had no taste for politics, and because he was averse to
stated, routine literary work. Subsequently Mr. Murray offered him a
salary of a thousand guineas to edit a periodical to be published by
himself. This was declined, as also was another offer to contribute to
the “London Quarterly” with the liberal pay of one hundred guineas an
article. For the “Quarterly” he would not write, because, he says, “it
has always been so hostile to my country, I cannot draw a pen in its
service.” This is worthy of note in view of a charge made afterwards,
when he was attacked for his English sympathies, that he was a frequent
contributor to this anti-American review. His sole contributions to
it were a gratuitous review of the book of an American author, and an
explanatory article, written at the desire of his publisher, on the
“Conquest of Granada.” It is not necessary to dwell upon the small
scandal about Irving's un-American' feeling. If there was ever a man
who loved his country and was proud of it; whose broad, deep, and strong
patriotism did not need the saliency of ignorant partisanship, it was
Washington Irving. He was, like his namesake, an American, and with the
same pure loyalty and unpartisan candor.
The first number of the “Sketch-Book” was published in America in May,
1819. Irving was then thirty-six years old. The series was not completed
till September, 1820. The first installment was carried mainly by two
papers, “The Wife” and “Rip Van Winkle:” the one full of tender
pathos that touched all hearts, because it was recognized as a genuine
expression of the author's nature; and the other a happy effort of
imaginative humor, one of those strokes of genius that re-create the
world and clothe it with the unfading hues of romance; the theme was
an old-world echo, transformed by genius into a primal story that will
endure as long as the Hudson flows through its mountains to the sea. A
great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas.
The “Sketch-Book” created a sensation in America, and the echo of it
was not long in reaching England. The general chorus of approval and the
rapid sale surprised Irving, and sent his spirits up, but success had
the effect on him that it always has on a fine nature. He writes to
Leslie: “Now you suppose I am all on the alert, and full of spirit and
excitement. No such thing. I am just as good for nothing as ever I was;
and, indeed, have been flurried and put out of my way by these pufflngs.
I feel something as I suppose you did when your picture met with
success,--anxious to do something better, and at a loss what to do.”
It was with much misgiving that Irving made this venture. “I feel great
diffidence,” he writes Brevoort, March 3, 1819, “about this reappearance
in literature. I am conscious of my imperfections, and my mind has been
for a long time past so pressed upon and agitated by various cares and
anxieties, that I fear it has lost much of its cheerfulness and some of
its activity. I have attempted no lofty theme, nor sought to look
wise and learned, which appears to be very much the fashion among our
American writers at present. I have preferred addressing myself to the
feelings and fancy of the reader more than to his judgment. My writings
may appear, therefore, light and trifling in our country of philosophers
and politicians. But if they possess merit in the class of literature to
which they belong, it is all to which I aspire in the work. I seek only
to blow a flute accompaniment in the national concert, and leave others
to play the fiddle and Frenchhorn.” This diffidence was not assumed.
All through his career, a breath of criticism ever so slight acted
temporarily like a boar-frost upon his productive power. He always saw
reasons to take sides with his critic. Speaking of “vanity” in a letter
of March, 1820, when Scott and Lockhart and all the Reviews were in a
full chorus of acclaim, he says: “I wish I did possess more of it, but
it seems my curse at present to have anything but confidence in myself
or pleasure in anything I have written.”
In a similar strain he had written, in September, 1819, on the news of
the cordial reception of the “Sketch-Book” in America:
“The manner in which the work has been received, and the eulogiums
that have been passed upon it in the American papers and periodical
works, have completely overwhelmed me. They go far, far beyond my
most sanguine expectations, and indeed are expressed with such
peculiar warmth and kindness as to affect me in the tenderest
manner. The receipt of your letter, and the reading of some of the
criticisms this morning, have rendered me nervous for the whole day.
I feel almost appalled by such success, and fearful that it cannot
be real, or that it is not fully merited, or that I shall not act up
to the expectations that may be formed. We are whimsically
constituted beings. I had got out of conceit of all that I had
written, and considered it very questionable stuff; and now that it
is so extravagantly be praised, I begin to feel afraid that I shall
not do as well again. However, we shall see as we get on. As yet I
am extremely irregular and precarious in my fits of composition.
The least thing puts me out of the vein, and even applause flurries
me and prevents my writing, though of course it will ultimately be a
stimulus....
“I have been somewhat touched by the manner in which my writings
have been noticed in the 'Evening Post.' I had considered Coleman
as cherishing an ill-will toward me, and, to tell the truth, have
not always been the most courteous in my opinions concerning him.
It is a painful thing either to dislike others or to fancy they
dislike us, and I have felt both pleasure and self-reproach at
finding myself so mistaken with respect to Mr. Coleman. I like to
out with a good feeling as soon as it rises, and so I have dropt
Coleman a line on the subject.
“I hope you will not attribute all this sensibility to the kind
reception I have met to an author's vanity. I am sure it proceeds
from very different sources. Vanity could not bring the tears into
my eyes as they have been brought by the kindness of my countrymen.
I have felt cast down, blighted, and broken-spirited, and these
sudden rays of sunshine agitate me more than they revive me. I
hope--I hope I may yet do something more worthy of the appreciation
lavished on me.”
Irving had not contemplated publishing in England, but the papers began
to be reprinted, and he was obliged to protect himself. He offered the
sketches to Murray, the princely publisher, who afterwards dealt so
liberally with him, but the venture was declined in a civil note,
written in that charming phraseology with which authors are familiar,
but which they would in vain seek to imitate. Irving afterwards greatly
prized this letter. He undertook the risks of the publication himself,
and the book sold well, although “written by an author the public knew
nothing of, and published by a bookseller who was going to ruin.” In a
few months Murray, who was thereafter proud to be Irving's publisher,
undertook the publication of the two volumes of the “Sketch-Book,” and
also of the “Knickerbocker” history, which Mr. Lockhart had just been
warmly praising in “Blackwood's.” Indeed, he bought the copyright of
the “Sketch-Book” for two hundred pounds. The time for the publisher's
complaisance had arrived sooner even than Scott predicted in one of his
kindly letters to Irving, “when
“'Your name is up and may go
From Toledo to Madrid.'”
Irving passed five years in England. Once recognized by the literary
world, whatever was best in the society of letters and of fashion was
open to him. He was a welcome guest in the best London houses, where he
met the foremost literary personages of the time, and established
most cordial relations with many of them; not to speak of statesmen,
soldiers, and men and women of fashion, there were the elder D'Israeli,
Southey, Campbell, Hallam, Gifford, Milman, Foscolo, Rogers, Scott, and
Belzoni fresh from his Egyptian explorations. In Irving's letters
this old society passes in review: Murray's drawing-rooms; the amusing
blue-stocking coteries of fashion of which Lady Caroline Lamb was a
promoter; the Countess of Besborough's, at whose house the Duke could
be seen; the Wimbledon country seat of Lord and Lady Spence; Belzoni, a
giant of six feet five, the center of a group of eager auditors of
the Egyptian marvels; Hallam, affable and unpretending, and a copious
talker; Gifford, a small, shriveled, deformed man of sixty, with
something of a humped back, eyes that diverge, and a large mouth,
reclining on a sofa, propped up by cushions, with none of the petulance
that you would expect from his Review, but a mild, simple, unassuming
man,--he it is who prunes the contributions and takes the sting out of
them (one would like to have seen them before the sting was taken out);
and Scott, the right honest-hearted, entering into the passing scene
with the hearty enjoyment of a child, to whom literature seems a sport
rather than a labor or ambition, an author void of all the petulance,
egotism, and peculiarities of the craft. We have Moore's authority for
saying that the literary dinner described in the “Tales of a Traveller,”
whimsical as it seems and pervaded by the conventional notion of the
relations of publishers and authors, had a personal foundation. Irving's
satire of both has always the old-time Grub Street flavor, or at least
the reminiscent tone, which is, by the way, quite characteristic of
nearly everything that he wrote about England. He was always a little
in the past tense. Buckthorne's advice to his friend is, never to be
eloquent to an author except in praise of his own works, or, what
is nearly as acceptable, in disparagement of the work of his
contemporaries. “If ever he speaks favorably of the productions of a
particular friend, dissent boldly from him; pronounce his friend to be
a blockhead; never fear his being vexed. Much as people speak of the
irritability of authors, I never found one to take offense at such
contradictions. No, no, sir, authors are particularly candid in
admitting the faults of their friends.” At the dinner Buckthorne
explains the geographical boundaries in the land of literature: you
may judge tolerably well of an author's popularity by the wine his
bookseller gives him. “An author crosses the port line about the third
edition, and gets into claret; and when he has reached the sixth or
seventh, he may revel in champagne and burgundy.” The two ends of the
table were occupied by the two partners, one of whom laughed at
the clever things said by the poet, while the other maintained his
sedateness and kept on carving. “His gravity was explained to us by my
friend Buckthorne. He informed me that the concerns of the house were
admirably distributed among the partners. Thus, for instance, said he,
the grave gentleman is the carving partner, who attends to the joints;
and the other is the laughing partner, who attends to the jokes.” If any
of the jokes from the lower end of the table reached the upper end, they
seldom produced much effect. “Even the laughing partner did not think
it necessary to honor them with a smile; which my neighbor Buckthorne
accounted for by informing me that there was a certain degree of
popularity to be obtained before a book seller could afford to laugh at
an author's jokes.”
In August, 1820, we find Irving in Paris, where his reputation secured
him a hearty welcome: he was often at the Cannings' and at Lord
Holland's; Talma, then the king of the stage, became his friend, and
there he made the acquaintance of Thomas Moore, which ripened into a
familiar and lasting friendship. The two men were drawn to each other;
Irving greatly admired the “noble hearted, manly, spirited little
fellow, with a mind as generous as his fancy is brilliant.” Talma was
playing “Hamlet” to overflowing houses, which hung on his actions with
breathless attention, or broke into ungovernable applause; ladies were
carried fainting from the boxes. The actor is described as short in
stature, rather inclined to fat, with a large face and a thick neck; his
eyes are bluish, and have a peculiar cast in them at times. He said to
Irving that he thought the French character much changed--graver; the
day of the classic drama, mere declamation and fine language, had
gone by; the Revolution had taught them to demand real life, incident,
passion, character. Irving's life in Paris was gay enough, and seriously
interfered with his literary projects. He had the fortunes of his
brother Peter on his mind also, and invested his earnings, then and
for some years after, in enterprises for his benefit that ended in
disappointment.
The “Sketch-Book” was making a great fame for him in England. Jeffrey,
in the “Edinburgh Review,” paid it a most flattering tribute, and even
the savage “Quarterly” praised it. A rumor attributed it to Scott, who
was always masquerading; at least, it was said, he might have revised
it, and should have the credit of its exquisite style. This led to a
sprightly correspondence between Lady Littleton, the daughter of Earl
Spencer, one of the most accomplished and lovely women of England, and
Benjamin Rush, Minister to the Court of St. James, in the course of
which Mr. Rush suggested the propriety of giving out under his official
seal that Irving was the author of “Waverley.” “Geoffrey Crayon is the
most fashionable fellow of the day,” wrote the painter Leslie. Lord
Byron, in a letter to Murray, underscored his admiration of the author,
and subsequently said to an American, “His Crayon,--I know it by heart;
at least, there is not a passage that I cannot refer to immediately.”
And afterwards he wrote to Moore, “His writings are my delight.” There
seemed to be, as some one wrote, “a kind of conspiracy to hoist him over
the heads of his contemporaries.” Perhaps the most satisfactory evidence
of his popularity was his publisher's enthusiasm. The publisher is an
infallible contemporary barometer.
It is worthy of note that an American should have captivated public
attention at the moment when Scott and Byron were the idols of the
English-reading world.
In the following year Irving was again in England, visiting his sister
in Birmingham, and tasting moderately the delights of London. He was,
indeed, something of an invalid. An eruptive malady,--the revenge
of nature, perhaps, for defeat in her earlier attack on his
lungs,-appearing in his ankles, incapacitated him for walking, tormented
him at intervals so that literary composition was impossible, sent
him on pilgrimages to curative springs, and on journeys undertaken for
distraction and amusement, in which all work except that of seeing and
absorbing material had to be postponed. He was subject to this recurring
invalidism all his life, and we must regard a good part of the work he
did as a pure triumph of determination over physical discouragement.
This year the fruits of his interrupted labor appeared in “Bracebridge
Hall,” a volume that was well received, but did not add much to his
reputation, though it contained “Dolph Heyliger,” one of his most
characteristic Dutch stories, and the “Stout Gentleman,” one of his
daintiest and most artistic bits of restrained humor.--['I was once'
says his biographer reading aloud in his presence a very flattering
review of his works, which, had been sent him by the critic in 1848, and
smiled as I came to this sentence: 'His most comical pieces have always
a serious end in view.'--'You laugh,' said he, but it is true. I have
kept that to myself hitherto, but that man has found me out. He has
detected the moral of the Stout Gentleman with that air of whimsical
significance so natural to him.']
Irving sought relief from his malady by an extended tour in Germany. He
sojourned some time in Dresden, whither his reputation had preceded
him, and where he was cordially and familiarly received, not only by the
foreign residents, but at the prim and antiquated little court of King
Frederick Augustus and Queen Amalia. Of Irving at this time Mrs. Emily
Fuller (nee Foster), whose relations with him have been referred to,
wrote in 1860:
“He was thoroughly a gentleman, not merely in external manners
and look, but to the innermost fibres and core of his heart;
sweet-tempered, gentle, fastidious, sensitive, and gifted with the
warmest affections; the most delightful and invariably interesting
companion; gay and full of humor, even in spite of occasional fits
of melancholy, which he was, however, seldom subject to when with
those he liked; a gift of conversation that flowed like a full
river in sunshine,--bright, easy, and abundant.”
Those were pleasant days at Dresden, filled up with the society of
bright and warm-hearted people, varied by royal boar hunts, stiff
ceremonies at the little court, tableaux, and private theatricals, yet
tinged with a certain melancholy, partly constitutional, that appears in
most of his letters. His mind was too unsettled for much composition.
He had little self-confidence, and was easily put out by a breath of
adverse criticism. At intervals he would come to the Fosters to read a
manuscript of his own.
“On these occasions strict orders were given that no visitor should
be admitted till the last word had been read, and the whole praised
or criticised, as the case may be. Of criticism, however, we were
very spare, as a slight word would put him out of conceit of a whole
work. One of the best things he has published was thrown aside,
unfinished, for years, because the friend to whom he read it,
happening, unfortunately, not to be well, and sleepy, did not seem
to take the interest in it he expected. Too easily discouraged, it
was not till the latter part of his career that he ever appreciated
himself as an author. One condemning whisper sounded louder in his
ear than the plaudits of thousands.”
This from Miss Emily Foster, who elsewhere notes his kindliness in
observing life:
“Some persons, in looking upon life, view it as they would view a
picture, with a stern and criticising eye. He also looks upon life
as a picture, but to catch its beauties, its lights,--not its
defects and shadows. On the former he loves to dwell. He has a
wonderful knack at shutting his eyes to the sinister side of
anything. Never beat a more kindly heart than his; alive to the
sorrows, but not to the faults, of his friends, but doubly alive to
their virtues and goodness. Indeed, people seemed to grow more good
with one so unselfish and so gentle.”
In London, some years later:
“He was still the same; time changed him very little. His
conversation was as interesting as ever [he was always an excellent
relater]; his dark gray eyes still full of varying feeling; his smile
'half playful, half melancholy, but ever kind. All that was mean,
or envious, or harsh, he seemed to turn from so completely that,
when with him, it seemed that such things were not. All gentle and
tender affections, Nature in her sweetest or grandest moods,
pervaded his whole imagination, and left no place for low or evil
thoughts; and when in good spirits, his humor, his droll
descriptions, and his fun would make the gravest or the saddest
laugh.”
As to Irving's “state of mind” in Dresden, it is pertinent to quote a
passage from what we gather to be a journal kept by Miss Flora Foster:
“He has written. He has confessed to my mother, as to a true and
dear friend, his love for E----, and his conviction of its utter
hopelessness. He feels himself unable to combat it. He thinks he
must try, by absence, to bring more peace to his mind. Yet he
cannot bear to give up our friendship,--an intercourse become so
dear to him, and so necessary to his daily happiness. Poor Irving!”
It is well for our peace of mind that we do not know what is going down
concerning us in “journals.” On his way to the Herrnhuthers, Mr. Irving
wrote to Mrs. Foster:
“When I consider how I have trifled with my time, suffered painful
vicissitudes of feeling, which for a time damaged both mind and
body,--when I consider all this, I reproach myself that I did not
listen to the first impulse of my mind, and abandon Dresden long
since. And yet I think of returning! Why should I come back to
Dresden? The very inclination that dooms me thither should furnish
reasons for my staying away.”
In this mood, the Herrnhuthers, in their right-angled, whitewashed
world, were little attractive.
“If the Herrnhuthers were right in their notions, the world would
have been laid out in squares and angles and right lines, and
everything would have been white and black and snuff-color, as they
have been clipped by these merciless retrenchers of beauty and
enjoyment. And then their dormitories! Think of between one and
two hundred of these simple gentlemen cooped up at night in one
great chamber! What a concert of barrel-organs in this great
resounding saloon! And then their plan of marriage! The very birds
of the air choose their mates from preference and inclination; but
this detestable system of lot! The sentiment of love may be, and
is, in a great measure, a fostered growth of poetry and romance, and
balder-dashed with false sentiment; but with all its vitiations, it
is the beauty and the charm, the flavor and the fragrance, of all
intercourse between man and woman; it is the rosy cloud in the
morning of life; and if it does too often resolve itself into the
shower, yet, to my mind, it only makes our nature more fruitful in
what is excellent and amiable.”
Better suited him Prague, which is certainly a part of the “naughty
world” that Irving preferred:
“Old Prague still keeps up its warrior look, and swaggers about with
its rusty corselet and helm, though both sadly battered. There
seems to me to be an air of style and fashion about the first people
of Prague, and a good deal of beauty in the fashionable circle.
This, perhaps, is owing to my contemplating it from a distance, and
my imagination lending it tints occasionally. Both actors and
audience, contemplated from the pit of a theatre, look better than
when seen in the boxes and behind the scenes. I like to contemplate
society in this way occasionally, and to dress it up by the help of
fancy, to my own taste. When I get in the midst of it, it is too
apt to lose its charm, and then there is the trouble and ennui of
being obliged to take an active part in the farce; but to be a mere
spectator is amusing. I am glad, therefore, that I brought no
letters to Prague. I shall leave it with a favorable idea of its
society and manners, from knowing nothing accurate of either; and
with a firm belief that every pretty woman I have seen is an angel,
as I am apt to think every pretty woman, until I have found her
out.”
In July, 1823, Irving returned to Paris, to the society of the Moores
and the fascinations of the gay town, and to fitful literary work. Our
author wrote with great facility and rapidity when the inspiration was
on him, and produced an astonishing amount of manuscript in a short
period; but he often waited and fretted through barren weeks and months
for the movement of his fitful genius. His mind was teeming constantly
with new projects, and nothing could exceed his industry when once he
had taken a work in hand; but he never acquired the exact methodical
habits which enable some literary men to calculate their power and
quantity of production as accurately as that of a cotton mill.
The political changes in France during the period of Irving's long
sojourn in Paris do not seem to have taken much of his attention. In a
letter dated October 5, 1826, he says: “We have had much bustle in Paris
of late, between the death of one king and the succession of another.
I have become a little callous to public sights, but have,
notwithstanding, been to see the funeral of the late king, and the
entrance into Paris of the present one. Charles X. begins his reign in
a very conciliating manner, and is really popular. The Bourbons have
gained great accession of power within a few years.”
The succession of Charles X. was also observed by another foreigner, who
was making agreeable personal notes at that time in Paris, but who is
not referred to by Irving, who, for some unexplained reason, failed to
meet the genial Scotsman at breakfast. Perhaps it is to his failure to
do so that he owes the semi-respectful reference to himself in Carlyle's
“Reminiscences.” Lacking the stimulus to his vocabulary of personal
acquaintance, Carlyle simply wrote: “Washington Irving was said to be in
Paris, a kind of lion at that time, whose books I somewhat esteemed.
One day the Emerson-Tennant people bragged that they had engaged him to
breakfast with us at a certain cafe next morning. We all attended duly,
Strackey among the rest, but no Washington came. 'Could n't rightly
come,' said Malcolm to me in a judicious aside, as we cheerfully
breakfasted without him. I never saw Washington at all, but still have
a mild esteem of the good man.” This ought to be accepted as evidence of
Carlyle's disinclination to say ill-natured things of those he did not
know.
The “Tales of a Traveller” appeared in 1826. In the author's opinion,
with which the best critics agreed, it contained some of his best
writing. He himself said in a letter to Brevoort, “There was more of an
artistic touch about it, though this is not a thing to be appreciated
by the many.” It was rapidly written. The movement has a delightful
spontaneity, and it is wanting in none of the charms of his style,
unless, perhaps, the style is over-refined; but it was not a novelty,
and the public began to criticise and demand a new note. This may have
been one reason why he turned to a fresh field and to graver themes.
For a time he busied himself on some American essays of a semi-political
nature, which were never finished, and he seriously contemplated a Life
of Washington; but all these projects were thrown aside for one that
kindled his imagination,--the Life of Columbus; and in February,
1826, he was domiciled at Madrid, and settled down to a long period of
unremitting and intense labor.
VII. IN SPAIN
Irving's residence in Spain, which was prolonged till September,
1829, was the most fruitful period in his life, and of considerable
consequence to literature. It is not easy to overestimate the debt of
Americans to the man who first opened to them the fascinating domain of
early Spanish history and romance. We can conceive of it by reflecting
upon the blank that would exist without “The Alhambra,” “The Conquest
of Granada,” “The Legends of the Conquest of Spain,” and I may add the
popular loss if we had not “The Lives of Columbus and his Companions.”
Irving had the creative touch, or at least the magic of the pen, to give
a definite, universal, and romantic interest to whatever he described.
We cannot deny him that. A few lines about the inn of the Red Horse
at Stratford-on-Avon created a new object of pilgrimage right in the
presence of the house and tomb of the poet. And how much of the romantic
interest of all the English-reading world in the Alhambra is due to
him; the name invariably recalls his own, and every visitor there is
conscious of his presence. He has again and again been criticised almost
out of court, and written down to the rank of the mere idle humorist;
but as often as I take up “The Conquest of Granada” or “The Alhambra”
I am aware of something that has eluded the critical analysis, and I
conclude that if one cannot write for the few, it may be worth while to
write for the many.
It was Irving's intention, when he went to Madrid, merely to make a
translation of some historical documents which were then appearing,
edited by M. Navarrete, from the papers of Bishop Las Casas and the
journals of Columbus, entitled “The Voyages of Columbus.” But when
he found that this publication, although it contained many documents,
hitherto unknown, that threw much light on the discovery of the New
World, was rather a rich mass of materials for a history than a history
itself, and that he had access in Madrid libraries to great collections
of Spanish colonial history, he changed his plan, and determined to
write a Life of Columbus. His studies for this led him deep into the old
chronicles and legends of Spain, and out of these, with his own travel
and observation, came those books of mingled fables, sentiment,
fact, and humor which are, after all, the most enduring fruits of his
residence in Spain.
Notwithstanding his absorption in literary pursuits, Irving was not
denied the charm of domestic society, which was all his life his
chief delight. The house he most frequented in Madrid was that of Mr.
D'Oubril, the Russian Minister. In his charming household were Madame
D'Oubril and her niece, Mademoiselle Antoinette Bollviller, and Prince
Dolgorouki, a young attache of the legation. His letters to Prince
Dolgorouki and to Mademoiselle Antoinette give a most lively and
entertaining picture of his residence and travels in Spain. In one of
them to the prince, who was temporarily absent from the city, we have
glimpses of the happy hours, the happiest of all hours, passed in this
refined family circle. Here is one that exhibits the still fresh romance
in the heart of forty-four years:
“Last evening, at your house, we had one of the most lovely tableaux
I ever beheld. It was the conception of Murillo, represented by
Madame A----. Mademoiselle Antoinette arranged the tableau with her
usual good taste, and the effect was enchanting. It was more like a
vision of something spiritual and celestial than a representation of
anything merely mortal; or rather it was woman as in my romantic
days I have been apt to imagine her, approaching to the angelic
nature. I have frequently admired Madame A----as a mere beautiful
woman, when I have seen her dressed up in the fantastic attire of
the mode; but here I beheld her elevated into a representative of
the divine purity and grace, exceeding even the beau ideal of the
painter, for she even surpassed in beauty the picture of Murillo.
I felt as if I could have knelt down and worshiped her. Heavens!
what power women would have over us, if they knew how to sustain the
attractions which nature has bestowed upon them, and which we are so
ready to assist by our imaginations! For my part, I am
superstitious in my admiration of them, and like to walk in a
perpetual delusion, decking them out as divinities. I thank no one
to undeceive me, and to prove that they are mere mortals.”
And he continues in another strain:
“How full of interest is everything connected with the old times in
Spain! I am more and more delighted with the old literature of the
country, its chronicles, plays, and romances. It has the wild vigor
and luxuriance of the forests of my native country, which, however
savage and entangled, are more captivating to my imagination than
the finest parks and cultivated woodlands.
“As I live in the neighborhood of the library of the Jesuits'
College of St. Isidoro, I pass most of my mornings there.
You cannot think what a delight I feel in passing through its
galleries, filled with old parchment-bound books. It is a perfect
wilderness of curiosity to me. What a deep-felt, quiet luxury there
is in delving into the rich ore of these old, neglected volumes!
How these hours of uninterrupted intellectual enjoyment, so tranquil
and independent, repay one for the ennui and disappointment too
often experienced in the intercourse of society! How they serve to
bring back the feelings into a harmonious tone, after being jarred
and put out of tune by the collisions with the world!”
With the romantic period of Spanish history Irving was in ardent
sympathy. The story of the Saracens entranced his mind; his imagination
disclosed its oriental quality while he pored over the romance and the
ruin of that land of fierce contrasts, of arid wastes beaten by the
burning sun, valleys blooming with intoxicating beauty, cities of
architectural splendor and picturesque squalor. It is matter of regret
that he, who seemed to need the southern sun to ripen his genius, never
made a pilgrimage into the East, and gave to the world pictures of the
lands that he would have touched with the charm of their own color and
the witchery of their own romance.
I will quote again from the letters, for they reveal the man quite as
well as the more formal and better known writings. His first sight of
the Alhambra is given in a letter to Mademoiselle Bollviller:
“Our journey through La Mancha was cold and uninteresting, excepting
when we passed through the scenes of some of the exploits of Don
Quixote. We were repaid, however, by a night amidst the scenery of
the Sierra Morena, seen by the light of the full moon. I do not
know how this scenery would appear in the daytime, but by moonlight
it is wonderfully wild and romantic, especially after passing the
summit of the Sierra. As the day dawned we entered the stern and
savage defiles of the Despena Perros, which equals the wild
landscapes of Salvator Rosa. For some time we continued winding
along the brinks of precipices, overhung with cragged and fantastic
rocks; and after a succession of such rude and sterile scenes we
swept down to Carolina, and found ourselves in another climate.
The orange-trees, the aloes, and myrtle began to make their
appearance; we felt the warm temperature of the sweet South, and
began to breathe the balmy air of Andalusia. At Andujar we were
delighted with the neatness and cleanliness of the houses, the
patios planted with orange and citron trees, and refreshed by
fountains. We passed a charming evening on the banks of the famous
Guadalquivir, enjoying the mild, balmy air of a southern evening,
and rejoicing in the certainty that we were at length in this land
of promise....
“But Granada, bellissima Granada! Think what must have been our
delight when, after passing the famous bridge of Pinos, the scene of
many a bloody encounter between Moor and Christian, and remarkable
for having been the place where Columbus was overtaken by the
messenger of Isabella, when about to abandon Spain in despair, we
turned a promontory of the arid mountains of Elvira, and Granada,
with its towers, its Alhambra, and its snowy mountains, burst upon
our sight! The evening sun shone gloriously upon its red towers as
we approached it, and gave a mellow tone to the rich scenery of the
vega. It was like the magic glow which poetry and romance have shed
over this enchanting place...
“The more I contemplate these places, the more my admiration is
awakened for the elegant habits and delicate taste of the Moorish
monarchs. The delicately ornamented walls; the aromatic groves,
mingling with the freshness and the enlivening sounds of fountains
and rivers of water; the retired baths, bespeaking purity and
refinement; the balconies and galleries; open to the fresh mountain
breeze, and overlooking the loveliest scenery of the valley of the
Darro and the magnificent expanse of the vega,--it is impossible to
contemplate this delicious abode and not feel an admiration of the
genius and the poetical spirit of those who first devised this
earthly paradise. There is an intoxication of heart and soul in
looking over such scenery at this genial season. All nature is just
teeming with new life, and putting on the first delicate verdure and
bloom of spring. The almond-trees are in blossom; the fig-trees are
beginning to sprout; everything is in the tender bud, the young
leaf, or the half-open flower. The beauty of the season is but half
developed, so that while there is enough to yield present delight,
there is the flattering promise of still further enjoyment. Good
heavens! after passing two years amidst the sunburnt wastes of
Castile, to be let loose to rove at large over this fragrant and
lovely land!”
It was not easy, however, even in the Alhambra, perfectly to call up the
past:
“The verity of the present checks and chills the imagination in its
picturings of the past. I have been trying to conjure up images of
Boabdil passing in regal splendor through these courts; of his
beautiful queen; of the Abencerrages, the Gomares, and the other
Moorish cavaliers, who once filled these halls with the glitter of
arms and the splendor of Oriental luxury; but I am continually
awakened from my reveries by the jargon of an Andalusian peasant who
is setting out rose-bushes, and the song of a pretty Andalusian girl
who shows the Alhambra, and who is chanting a little romance that
has probably been handed down from generation to generation since
the time of the Moors.”
In another letter, written from Seville, he returns to the subject of
the Moors. He is describing an excursion to Alcala de la Guadayra:
“Nothing can be more charming than the windings of the little river
among banks hanging with gardens and orchards of all kinds of
delicate southern fruits, and tufted with flowers and aromatic
plants. The nightingales throng this lovely little valley as
numerously as they do the gardens of Aranjuez. Every bend of the
river presents a new landscape, for it is beset by old Moorish mills
of the most picturesque forms, each mill having an embattled tower,
a memento of the valiant tenure by which those gallant fellows, the
Moors, held this earthly paradise, having to be ready at all times
for war, and as it were to work with one hand and fight with the
other. It is impossible to travel about Andalusia and not imbibe a
kind feeling for those Moors. They deserved this beautiful country.
They won it bravely; they enjoyed it generously and kindly.
No lover ever delighted more to cherish and adorn a mistress, to
heighten and illustrate her charms, and to vindicate and defend her
against all the world than did the Moors to embellish, enrich,
elevate, and defend their beloved Spain. Everywhere I meet traces
of their sagacity, courage, urbanity, high poetical feeling, and
elegant taste. The noblest institutions in this part of Spain, the
best inventions for comfortable and agreeable living, and all those
habitudes and customs which throw a peculiar and Oriental charm over
the Andalusian mode of living may be traced to the Moors. Whenever
I enter these beautiful marble patios, set out with shrubs and
flowers, refreshed by fountains, sheltered with awnings from the
sun; where the air is cool at noonday, the ear delighted in sultry
summer by the sound of falling water; where, in a word, a little
paradise is shut up within the walls of home, I think on the poor
Moors, the inventors of all these delights. I am at times almost
ready to join in sentiment with a worthy friend and countryman of
mine whom I met in Malaga, who swears the Moors are the only people
that ever deserved the country, and prays to Heaven that they may
come over from Africa and conquer it again.”
In a following paragraph we get a glimpse of a world, however, that the
author loves still more:
“Tell me everything about the children. I suppose the discreet
princess will soon consider it an indignity to be ranked among the
number. I am told she is growing with might and main, and is
determined not to stop until she is a woman outright. I would give
all the money in my pocket to be with those dear little women at the
round table in the saloon, or on the grass-plot in the garden, to
tell them some marvelous tales.”
And again:
“Give my love to all my dear little friends of the round table, from
the discreet princess down to the little blue-eyed boy. Tell la
petite Marie that I still remain true to her, though surrounded by
all the beauties of Seville; and that I swear (but this she must
keep between ourselves) that there is not a little woman to compare
with her in all Andalusia.”
The publication of “The Life of Columbus,” which had been delayed by
Irving's anxiety to secure historical accuracy in every detail, did not
take place till February, 1828. For the English copyright Mr. Murray
paid him L 3150. He wrote an abridgment of it, which he presented to
his generous publisher, and which was a very profitable book (the first
edition of ten thousand copies sold immediately). This was followed by
the “Companions,” and by “The Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada,” for
which he received two thousand guineas. “The Alhambra” was not published
till just before Irving's return to America, in 1832, and was brought
out by Mr. Bentley, who bought it for one thousand guineas.
“The Conquest of Granada,” which I am told Irving in his latter years
regarded as the best of all his works, was declared by Coleridge “a
chef-d'oeuvre of its kind.” I think it bears rereading as well as any
of the Spanish books. Of the reception of the “Columbus” the author was
very doubtful. Before it was finished he wrote:
“I have lost confidence in the favorable disposition of my
countrymen, and look forward to cold scrutiny and stern criticism,
and this is a line of writing in which I have not hitherto
ascertained my own powers. Could I afford it, I should like to
write, and to lay my writings aside when finished. There is an
independent delight in study and in the creative exercise of the
pen; we live in a world of dreams, but publication lets in the noisy
rabble of the world, and there is an end of our dreaming.”
In a letter to Brevoort, February 23, 1828, he fears that he can never
regain:
“that delightful confidence which I once enjoyed of not the good
opinion, but the good will, of my countrymen. To me it is always
ten times more gratifying to be liked than to be admired; and I
confess to you, though I am a little too proud to confess it to the
world, the idea that the kindness of my countrymen toward me was
withering caused me for a long time the most weary depression of
spirits, and disheartened me from making any literary exertions.”
It has been a popular notion that Irving's career was uniformly one of
ease. In this same letter he exclaims: “With all my exertions, I seem
always to keep about up to my chin in troubled water, while the world, I
suppose, thinks I am sailing smoothly, with wind and tide in my favor.”
In a subsequent letter to Brevoort, dated at Seville, December 26, 1828,
occurs almost the only piece of impatience and sarcasm that this long
correspondence affords. “Columbus” had succeeded beyond his expectation,
and its popularity was so great that some enterprising American had
projected an abridgment, which it seems would not be protected by the
copyright of the original. Irving writes:
“I have just sent to my brother an abridgment of 'Columbus' to be
published immediately, as I find some paltry fellow is pirating an
abridgment. Thus every line of life has its depredation. 'There be
land rats and water rats, land pirates and water pirates,--I mean
thieves,' as old Shylock says. I feel vexed at this shabby attempt
to purloin this work from me, it having really cost me more toil and
trouble than all my other productions, and being one that I trusted
would keep me current with my countrymen; but we are making rapid
advances in literature in America, and have already attained many of
the literary vices and diseases of the old countries of Europe.
We swarm with reviewers, though we have scarce original works
sufficient for them to alight and prey upon, and we closely imitate
all the worst tricks of the trade and of the craft in England.
Our literature, before long, will be like some of those premature
and aspiring whipsters, who become old men before they are young
ones, and fancy they prove their manhood by their profligacy and
their diseases.”
But the work had an immediate, continued, and deserved success. It was
critically contrasted with Robertson's account of Columbus, and it is
open to the charge of too much rhetorical color here and there, and it
is at times too diffuse; but its substantial accuracy is not questioned,
and the glow of the narrative springs legitimately from the romance
of the theme. Irving understood, what our later historians have fully
appreciated, the advantage of vivid individual portraiture in historical
narrative. His conception of the character and mission of Columbus is
largely outlined, but firmly and most carefully executed, and is one
of the noblest in literature. I cannot think it idealized, though
it required a poetic sensibility to enter into sympathy with the
magnificent dreamer, who was regarded by his own generation as the
fool of an idea. A more prosaic treatment would have utterly failed to
represent that mind, which existed from boyhood in an ideal world, and,
amid frustrated hopes, shattered plans, and ignoble returns for his
sacrifices, could always rebuild its glowing projects and conquer
obloquy and death itself with immortal anticipations.
Towards the close of his residence in Spain, Irving received
unexpectedly the appointment of Secretary of Legation to the Court of
St. James, at which Louis McLane was American Minister; and after some
hesitation, and upon the urgency of his friends, he accepted it. He was
in the thick of literary projects. One of these was the History of the
Conquest of Mexico, which he afterwards surrendered to Mr. Prescott, and
another was the “Life of Washington,” which was to wait many years for
fulfillment. His natural diffidence and his reluctance to a routine life
made him shrink from the diplomatic appointment; but once engaged in
it, and launched again in London society, he was reconciled to the
situation. Of honors there was no lack, nor of the adulation of social
and literary circles. In April, 1830, the Royal Society of Literature
awarded him one of the two annual gold medals placed at the disposal of
the society by George IV., to be given to authors of literary works of
eminent merit, the other being voted to the historian Hallam; and this
distinction was followed by the degree of D. C. L. from the University
of Oxford,--a title which the modest author never used.
VIII. RETURN TO AMERICA--SUNNYSIDE--THE MISSION TO MADRID
In 1831 Mr. Irving was thrown, by his diplomatic position, into the
thick of the political and social tumult, when the Reform Bill was
pending and war was expected in Europe. It is interesting to note that
for a time he laid aside his attitude of the dispassionate observer, and
caught the general excitement. He writes in March, expecting that the
fate of the cabinet will be determined in a week, looking daily for
decisive news from Paris, and fearing dismal tidings from Poland.
“However,” he goes on to say in a vague way, “the great cause of all the
world will go on. What a stirring moment it is to live in! I never took
such intense interest in newspapers. It seems to me as if life were
breaking out anew with me, or that I were entering upon quite a new and
almost unknown career of existence, and I rejoice to find sensibilities,
which were waning as to many objects of past interest, reviving with all
their freshness and vivacity at the scenes and prospects opening around
me.” He expects the breaking of the thraldom of falsehood woven over
the human mind; and, more definitely, hopes that the Reform Bill will
prevail. Yet he is oppressed by the gloom hanging over the booksellers'
trade, which he thinks will continue until reform and cholera have
passed away.
During the last months of his residence in England, the author renewed
his impressions of Stratford (the grateful landlady of the Red Horse Inn
showed him a poker which was locked up among the treasures of her house,
on which she had caused to be engraved “Geoffrey Crayon's Sceptre”);
spent some time at Newstead Abbey; and had the sorrowful pleasure in
London of seeing Scott once more, and for the last time. The great
novelist, in the sad eclipse of his powers, was staying in the city, on
his way to Italy, and Mr. Lockhart asked Irving to dine with him. It was
but a melancholy repast. “Ah,” said Scott, as Irving gave him his arm,
after dinner, “the times are changed, my good fellow, since we went over
the Eildon Hills together. It is all nonsense to tell a man that his
mind is not affected when his body is in this state.”
Irving retired from the legation in September, 1831, to return home, the
longing to see his native land having become intense; but his arrival in
New York was delayed till May, 1832.
If he had any doubts of the sentiments of his countrymen toward him, his
reception in New York dissipated them. America greeted her most famous
literary man with a spontaneous outburst of love and admiration. The
public banquet in New York, that was long remembered for its brilliancy,
was followed by the tender of the same tribute in other cities, an honor
which his unconquerable shrinking from this kind of publicity compelled
him to decline.
The “Dutch Herodotus, Diedrich Knickerbocker,” to use the phrase of a
toast, having come out of one such encounter with fair credit, did not
care to tempt Providence further. The thought of making a dinner-table
speech threw him into a sort of whimsical panic,--a noble infirmity,
which characterized also Hawthorne and Thackeray.
The enthusiasm manifested for the homesick author was equaled by his own
for the land and the people he supremely loved. Nor was his surprise at
the progress made during seventeen years less than his delight in it.
His native place had become a city of two hundred thousand inhabitants;
the accumulation of wealth and the activity of trade astonished him, and
the literary stir was scarcely less unexpected. The steamboat had come
to be used, so that he seemed to be transported from place to place
by magic; and on a near view the politics of America seemed not less
interesting than those of Europe. The nullification battle was set;
the currency conflict still raged; it was a time of inflation and land
speculation; the West, every day more explored and opened, was the land
of promise for capital and energy. Fortunes were made in a day by buying
lots in “paper towns.” Into some of these speculations Irving put his
savings; the investments were as permanent as they were unremunerative.
Irving's first desire, however, on his recovery from the state of
astonishment into which these changes plunged him, was to make himself
thoroughly acquainted with the entire country and its development. To
this end he made an extended tour in the South and West, which passed
beyond the bounds of frontier settlement. The fruit of his excursion
into the Pawnee country, on the waters of the Arkansas, a region
untraversed by white men, except solitary trappers, was “A Tour on the
Prairies,” a sort of romance of reality, which remains to-day as good a
description as we have of hunting adventure on the plains. It led also
to the composition of other books on the West, which were more or less
mere pieces of book-making for the market.
Our author was far from idle. Indeed, he could not afford to be.
Although he had received considerable sums from his books, and perhaps
enough for his own simple wants, the responsibility of the support of
his two brothers, Peter and Ebenezer, and several nieces, devolved upon
him. And, besides, he had a longing to make himself a home, where he
could pursue his calling undisturbed, and indulge the sweets of domestic
and rural life, which of all things lay nearest his heart. And these two
undertakings compelled him to be diligent with his pen to the end of his
life. The spot he chose for his “Roost” was a little farm on the bank of
the river at Tarrytown, close to his old Sleepy Hollow haunt, one of
the loveliest, if not the most picturesque, situations on the Hudson.
At first he intended nothing more than a summer retreat, inexpensive
and simply furnished. But his experience was that of all who buy, and
renovate, and build. The farm had on it a small stone Dutch cottage,
built about a century before, and inhabited by one of the Van Tassels.
This was enlarged, still preserving the quaint Dutch characteristics; it
acquired a tower and a whimsical weather-cock, the delight of the owner
(“it was brought from Holland by Gill Davis, the King of Coney Island,
who says he got it from a windmill which they were demolishing at
the gate of Rotterdam, which windmill has been mentioned in
'Knickerbocker'”), and became one of the most snug and picturesque
residences on the river. When the slip of Melrose ivy, which was brought
over from Scotland by Mrs. Renwick and given to the author, had grown
and well overrun it, the house, in the midst of sheltering groves and
secluded walks, was as pretty a retreat as a poet could desire. But
the little nook proved to have an insatiable capacity for swallowing up
money, as the necessities of the author's establishment increased: there
was always something to be done to the grounds; some alterations in the
house; a greenhouse, a stable, a gardener's cottage, to be built,--and
to the very end the outlay continued. The cottage necessitated economy
in other personal expenses, and incessant employment of his pen. But
Sunnyside, as the place was named, became the dearest spot on earth to
him; it was his residence, from which he tore himself with reluctance,
and to which he returned with eager longing; and here, surround by
relatives whom he loved, he passed nearly all the remainder of his
years, in as happy conditions, I think, as a bachelor ever enjoyed. His
intellectual activity was unremitting, he had no lack of friends, there
was only now and then a discordant note in the general estimation of his
literary work, and he was the object of the most tender care from his
nieces. Already, he writes, in October, 1838, “my little cottage is well
stocked. I have Ebenezer's five girls, and himself also, whenever he
can be spared from town; sister Catherine and her daughter; Mr. Davis
occasionally, with casual visits from all the rest of our family
connection. The cottage, therefore, is never lonely.” I like to dwell
in thought upon this happy home, a real haven of rest after many
wanderings; a seclusion broken only now and then by enforced absence,
like that in Madrid as minister, but enlivened by many welcome guests.
Perhaps the most notorious of these was a young Frenchman, a “somewhat
quiet guest,” who, after several months' imprisonment on board a French
man-of-war, was set on shore at Norfolk, and spent a couple of months in
New York and its vicinity, in 1837. This visit was vividly recalled
by Irving in a letter to his sister, Mrs. Storrow, who was in Paris in
1853, and had just been presented at court:
“Louis Napoleon and Eugenie Montijo, Emperor and Empress of France!
one of whom I have had a guest at my cottage on the Hudson; the
other, whom, when a child, I have had on my knee at Granada. It
seems to cap the climax of the strange dramas of which Paris has
been the theatre during my lifetime. I have repeatedly thought that
each grand coup de theatre would be the last that would occur in my
time; but each has been succeeded by another equally striking; and
what will be the next, who can conjecture?
“The last time I saw Eugenie Montijo she was one of the reigning
belles of Madrid; and she and her giddy circle had swept away my
charming young friend, the beautiful and accomplished--------,
into their career of fashionable dissipation. Now Eugenie is upon a
throne, and a voluntary recluse in a convent of one of the most
rigorous orders! Poor----! Perhaps, however, her fate may
ultimately be the happiest of the two. 'The storm' with her 'is
o'er, and she's at rest;' but the other is launched upon a
returnless shore, on a dangerous sea, infamous for its tremendous
shipwrecks. Am I to live to see the catastrophe of her career, and
the end of this suddenly conjured-up empire, which seems to 'be of
such stuff as dreams are made of'?”
As we have seen, the large sums Irving earned by his pen were not spent
in selfish indulgence. His habits and tastes were simple, and little
would have sufficed for his individual needs. He cared not much for
money, and seemed to want it only to increase the happiness of those who
were confided to his care. A man less warm-hearted and more selfish, in
his circumstances, would have settled down to a life of more ease and
less responsibility.
To go back to the period of his return to America. He was now past
middle life, having returned to New York in his fiftieth year. But he
was in the full flow of literary productiveness. I have noted the dates
of his achievements, because his development was somewhat tardy compared
that of many of his contemporaries; but he had the “staying” qualities.
The first crop of his mind was of course the most original; time and
experience had toned down his exuberant humor; but the spring of his
fancy was as free, his vigor was not abated, and his art was more
refined. Some of his best work was yet to be done.
And it is worthy of passing mention, in regard to his later productions,
that his admirable sense of literary proportion, which is wanting in
many good writers, characterized his work to the end.
High as his position as a man of letters was at this time, the
consideration in which he was held was much broader than that,--it was
that of one of the first citizens of the Republic. His friends, readers,
and admirers were not merely the literary class and the general public,
but included nearly all the prominent statesmen of the time. Almost any
career in public life would have been open to him if he had lent an ear
to their solicitations. But political life was not to his taste, and it
would have been fatal to his sensitive spirit. It did not require much
self-denial, perhaps, to decline the candidacy for mayor of New York,
or the honor of standing for Congress; but he put aside also the
distinction of a seat in Mr. Van Buren's cabinet as Secretary of the
Navy. His main reason for declining it, aside from a diffidence in
his own judgment in public matters, was his dislike of the turmoil of
political life in Washington, and his sensitiveness to personal attacks
which beset the occupants of high offices. But also he had come to a
political divergence with Mr. Van Buren. He liked the man,--he liked
almost everybody,--and esteemed him as a friend, but he apprehended
trouble from the new direction of the party in power. Irving was almost
devoid of party prejudice, and he never seemed to have strongly marked
political opinions. Perhaps his nearest confession to a creed
is contained in a letter he wrote to a member of the House of
Representatives, Gouverneur Kemble, a little time before the offer of
a position in the cabinet, in which he said that he did not relish some
points of Van Buren's policy, nor believe in the honesty of some of his
elbow counselors. I quote a passage from it:
“As far as I know my own mind, I am thoroughly a republican, and
attached, from complete conviction, to the institutions of my
country; but I am a republican without gall, and have no bitterness
in my creed. I have no relish for Puritans, either in religion or
politics, who are for pushing principles to an extreme, and for
overturning everything that stands in the way of their own zealous
career.... Ours is a government of compromise. We have
several great and distinct interests bound up together, which, if
not separately consulted and severally accommodated, may harass and
impair each other.... I always distrust the soundness of
political councils that are accompanied by acrimonious and
disparaging attacks upon any great class of our fellow-citizens.
Such are those urged to the disadvantage of the great trading and
financial classes of our country.”
During the ten years preceding his mission to Spain, Irving kept fagging
away at the pen, doing a good deal of miscellaneous and ephemeral work.
Among his other engagements was that of regular contributor to the
“Knickerbocker Magazine,” for a salary of two thousand dollars. He wrote
the editor that he had observed that man, as he advances in life, is
subject to a plethora of the mind, occasioned by an accumulation of
wisdom upon the brain, and that he becomes fond of telling long stories
and doling out advice, to the annoyance of his friends. To avoid
becoming the bore of the domestic circle, he proposed to ease off this
surcharge of the intellect by inflicting his tediousness on the public
through the pages of the periodical. The arrangement brought reputation
to the magazine (which was published in the days when the honor of being
in print was supposed by the publisher to be ample compensation to
the scribe), but little profit to Mr. Irving. During this period
he interested himself in an international copyright, as a means of
fostering our young literature. He found that a work of merit, written
by an American who had not established a commanding name in the market,
met very cavalier treatment from our publishers, who frankly said that
they need not trouble themselves about native works, when they could
pick up every day successful books from the British press, for which
they had to pay no copyright. Irving's advocacy of the proposed law was
entirely unselfish, for his own market was secure.
His chief works in these ten years were, “A Tour on the Prairies,”
“Recollections of Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey,” “The Legends of the
Conquest of Spain,” “Astoria” (the heavy part of the work of it was done
by his nephew Pierre), “Captain Bonneville,” and a number of graceful
occasional papers, collected afterwards under the title of “Wolfert's
Roost.” Two other books may properly be mentioned here, although they
did not appear until after his return from his absence of four years and
a half at the court of Madrid; these are the “Biography of Goldsmith”
and “Mahomet and his Successors.” At the age of sixty-six he laid aside
the “Life of Washington,” on which he was engaged, and rapidly threw off
these two books. The “Goldsmith” was enlarged from a sketch he had made
twenty-five years before. It is an exquisite, sympathetic piece of work,
without pretension or any subtle verbal analysis, but on the whole an
excellent interpretation of the character. Author and subject had much
in common: Irving had at least a kindly sympathy for the vagabondish
inclinations of his predecessor, and with his humorous and cheerful
regard of the world; perhaps it is significant of a deeper unity in
character that both, at times, fancied they could please an intolerant
world by attempting to play the flute. The “Mahomet” is a popular
narrative, which throws no new light on the subject; it is pervaded by
the author's charm of style and equity of judgment, but it lacks the
virility of Gibbon's masterly picture of the Arabian prophet and the
Saracenic onset.
We need not dwell longer upon this period. One incident of it, however,
cannot be passed in silence--that was the abandonment of his lifelong
project of writing the History of the Conquest of Mexico to Mr.
William H. Prescott. It had been a scheme of his boyhood; he had made
collections of materials for it during his first residence in Spain; and
he was actually and absorbedly engaged in the composition of the first
chapters, when he was sounded by Mr. Cogswell, of the Astor Library, in
behalf of Mr. Prescott. Some conversation showed that Mr. Prescott was
contemplating the subject upon which Mr. Irving was engaged, and the
latter instantly authorized Mr. Cogswell to say that he abandoned it.
Although our author was somewhat far advanced, and Mr. Prescott had not
yet collected his materials, Irving renounced the glorious theme in such
a manner that Prescott never suspected the pain and loss it cost him,
nor the full extent of his own obligation. Some years afterwards Irving
wrote to his nephew that in giving it up he in a manner gave up his
bread, as he had no other subject to supply its place: “I was,” he
wrote, “dismounted from my cheval de bataille, and have never been
completely mounted since.” But he added that he was not sorry for the
warm impulse that induced him to abandon the subject, and that
Mr. Prescott's treatment of it had justified his opinion of him.
Notwithstanding Prescott's very brilliant work, we cannot but feel some
regret that Irving did not write a Conquest of Mexico. His method, as
he outlined it, would have been the natural one. Instead of partially
satisfying the reader's curiosity in a preliminary essay, in which the
Aztec civilization was exposed, Irving would have begun with the entry
of the conquerors, and carried his reader step by step onward, letting
him share all the excitement and surprise of discovery which the
invaders experienced, and learn of the wonders of the country in the
manner most likely to impress both the imagination and the memory; and
with his artistic sense of the value of the picturesque he would have
brought into strong relief the dramatis personae of the story.
In 1842 Irving was tendered the honor of the mission to Madrid. It was
an entire surprise to himself and to his friends. He came to look upon
this as the “crowning honor of his life,” and yet when the news first
reached him, he paced up and down his room, excited and astonished,
revolving in his mind the separation from home and friends, and
was heard murmuring, half to himself and half to his nephew: “It is
hard,--very hard; yet I must try to bear it. God tempers the wind to the
shorn lamb.” His acceptance of the position was doubtless influenced by
the intended honor to his profession, by the gratifying manner in which
it came to him, by his desire to please his friends, and the belief,
which was a delusion, that diplomatic life in Madrid would offer no
serious interruption to his “Life of Washington,” in which he had
just become engaged. The nomination, the suggestion of Daniel Webster,
Tyler's Secretary of State, was cordially approved by the President and
cabinet, and confirmed almost by acclamation in the Senate. “Ah,” said
Mr. Clay, who was opposing nearly all the President's appointments,
“this is a nomination everybody will concur in!” “If a person of more
merit and higher qualification,” wrote Mr. Webster in his official
notification, “had presented himself, great as is my personal regard for
you, I should have yielded
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